Serialising request and response in ASP.NET Web API

Introduction

[Level T3] This is a short post on serialising/deserialising HTTP request and response messages in ASP.NET Web API.  Serialising messages manually can be achieved but is hard-work and you can run into various problems. ASP.NET Web API provides a means of achieving this through HttpMessageContent. This post is a follow-up to this discussion.

Background

There are many cases where you could be interested in serialising HttpRequestMessage or HttpResponseMessage. For me, I needed this to implement caching features on the HttpClient in CacheCow framework.

Technically speaking HTTP messages arrive in serialised format and all we need is access to the raw stream coming from server - as such no processing would be required. Unfortunately this is not possible since Web API does not read the message as a raw stream and then process it, instead it starts by reading various chunks, parsing it as it goes.

However, ASP.NET team implemented a feature that could be used for serialisation/deserialisation of request and response messages. If you have read Brad Wilson's batching post, you probably have seen noticed that HttpMessageContent can be used for implementing client-server batching. Now we will use this for serialisation.

HttpMessageContent

RFC 2616 in its appendices defines content types "message/http" and "application/http". application/http is a content-type that can contain more than one request or response.

Did we not have this in multi-part content-type? As we know, we can include different request or response parts in the same message and each part gets its own share of the headers, so what is the difference?

Well the difference is with multi-part, each part can only have headers related to content. And above all, they share the same status code. In application/http, each "part", as it were, is a complete request or response. For example, the requests each will have their own URI and responses their own status code.

HttpMessageContent can encapsulate multiple HttpRequestMessage or HttpResponseMessage but in our case we just need a single request or response.

Serialiser interface

Let's define an interface for our serialiser:

public interface IHttpMessageSerializer
{
 void Serialize(HttpResponseMessage response, Stream stream);
 void Serialize(HttpRequestMessage request, Stream stream);
 HttpResponseMessage DeserializeToResponse(Stream stream);
 HttpRequestMessage DeserializeToRequest(Stream stream);
}

UPDATE: Latest implementation is fully async and can be found as part of CacheCow library here.

Serialisation

In order to serialise, we need to create a new HttpMessageContent passing request or response and then use ReadAsByteArrayAsync to read the whole message as a byte array:

var httpMessageContent = new HttpMessageContent(request);
var buffer = httpMessageContent.ReadAsByteArrayAsync().Result;

As you can see it is very easy to serialise. Now the only caveat is that if you are serialising in a delegating handler, this will consume the message content stream so that it cannot be read further down the stream. If you do, you will see this error message:

The stream was already consumed. It cannot be read again.

The trick (for now) is to call the method ReadAsByteArrayAsync to force the content to be loaded into the buffer. Although we would not need the buffer we read (since the actual reading will happen inside HttpMessageContent), next time the content will be read from the buffer and not from the network. In my implementation I have made it optional whether to pre-read the content into the buffer.

Deserialisation

The trick with deserialisation is to create a normal HttpRequestMessage or HttpResponseMessage and set the content-type header into"application/http;msgtype=request" or "application/http;msgtype=response", accordingly". Then we use the special extension method to read into the an HttpMessageContent:

var request = new HttpRequestMessage();
request.Content = new ByteArrayContent(memoryStream.ToArray());
request.Content.Headers.Add("Content-Type", 
    "application/http;msgtype=request");
return request.Content.ReadAsHttpRequestMessageAsync().Result;

As you can see, all the heavy lifting happens inside the HttpMessageContent and there is really little code that we need to write.

Conclusion

We can use HttpMessageContent to serialise/deserialise request/response in ASP.NET Web API. Full implementation can be found as a GitHub gist here as part of CacheCow library here. This implementation is fully Async and takes advantage of IO completion ports exposed in Begin/End methods.

One word of caution is on cases where message needs to be used after serialisation - which would comprise many cases including serialisation in DelegatingHandler. In these cases we need to invoke ReadAsByteArrayAsync (or similar) to ensure the content is read into the buffer.