How to send and retrieve custom header information for REST WCF Service - rest

Question

I am struggling to set-up infrastructure in my solution to send and retrieve the custom header for REST WCF Service. Basically, we need this to send UserID, password, token value from client to service and if provided values are valid then operation will continue to execute otherwise throw exception.
We already have few classes inherited from interfaces like IDispatchMessageInspector, IClientMessageInspector, IEndPointBehaviour, MessageHeader, etc., This is working fine for WCF with soap request. I tried to use these classes for my new REST WCF Service, but was not working as MessageHeader derived class supports only Soap.
I also tried using WebOperationContext, but no luck :(
Please provide a solution along with sample project to solve this problem.
Thank you so much!

Answer 1

Seems in your case it might be easier to interogate the ASPNET pipeline
if you add the following to your WCF service to allow it to hookup into the ASPNET pipeline
[AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode =
AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]
Then you can simply now use the HttpContext object and just get the headers as you would from a normal aspnet application, e.g
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["CustomHeader"]

Answer 2

If you want to add http header in wcf rest service , you should use HttpRequestMessageProperty, it has a Headers property , you could set http Header through its Headers property
using (OperationContextScope scope = new OperationContextScope(client.InnerChannel))
{
HttpRequestMessageProperty property;
// if OutgoingMessageProperties already has HttpRequestMessageProperty, use the existing one , or initialize a new one and
// set OutgoingMessageProperties's HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name key's value to the initialized HttpRequestMessageProperty so that the HttpRequestMessageProperty will work
if (OperationContext.Current.OutgoingMessageProperties.ContainsKey(HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name)){
property = OperationContext.Current.OutgoingMessageProperties[HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name] as HttpRequestMessageProperty;
}
else
{
property = new HttpRequestMessageProperty();
OperationContext.Current.OutgoingMessageProperties[HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name] = property;
}
// add headers to HttpRequestMessageProperty, it will become the http header of the reuqest
property.Headers.Add(System.Net.HttpRequestHeader.Authorization, "myAuthorization");
string re = client.HelloWorld();
}
About getting the Header , just use WebOperationContext.Current.Headers.
WebOperationContext.Current.IncomingRequest.Headers["MyCustomHttpHeader"]
Please refer to http://kenneththorman.blogspot.com/2011/02/wcf-rest-client-using-custom-http.html