How to post JSON to a server using C#?

Arsen Zahray picture Arsen Zahray · Feb 5, 2012 · Viewed 670.5k times · Source

Here's the code I'm using:

// create a request
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)
WebRequest.Create(url); request.KeepAlive = false;
request.ProtocolVersion = HttpVersion.Version10;
request.Method = "POST";


// turn our request string into a byte stream
byte[] postBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(json);

// this is important - make sure you specify type this way
request.ContentType = "application/json; charset=UTF-8";
request.Accept = "application/json";
request.ContentLength = postBytes.Length;
request.CookieContainer = Cookies;
request.UserAgent = currentUserAgent;
Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream();

// now send it
requestStream.Write(postBytes, 0, postBytes.Length);
requestStream.Close();

// grab te response and print it out to the console along with the status code
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
string result;
using (StreamReader rdr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
{
    result = rdr.ReadToEnd();
}

return result;

When I'm running this, I'm always getting 500 internal server error.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer

Ademar picture Ademar · Apr 5, 2012

The way I do it and is working is:

var httpWebRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://url");
httpWebRequest.ContentType = "application/json";
httpWebRequest.Method = "POST";

using (var streamWriter = new StreamWriter(httpWebRequest.GetRequestStream()))
{
    string json = "{\"user\":\"test\"," +
                  "\"password\":\"bla\"}";

    streamWriter.Write(json);
}

var httpResponse = (HttpWebResponse)httpWebRequest.GetResponse();
using (var streamReader = new StreamReader(httpResponse.GetResponseStream()))
{
    var result = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
}

I wrote a library to perform this task in a simpler way, it is here: https://github.com/ademargomes/JsonRequest

Hope it helps.