Copy HTTP request / response headers from a call to a HttpWebRequest?

Question

I have a C# WCF service that receives a request Message and post it to another service. Posting to the other service is done through HttpWebRequest. How can i get in my service the original request HTTP headers and put them in the HttpWebRequest when i post them to the other service.

Something like this:

HttpRequestMessageProperty httpRequestProp = GetHttpRequestProp(requestMessage);
 HttpWebRequest loHttp = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
  foreach (var item in httpRequestProp.Headers.AllKeys)
            {

                 loHttp.Headers.Add(item, httpRequestProp.Headers[item]);
            }

I know this doesn't work because HttpWebRequest loHttp has its own properties, and when i try to set ContentType for example in the above way it throws exception because it needs to be set like this:

loHttp.ContentType = httpRequestProp.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.ContentType];

So is there a way to copy the HTTP request headers from a call and put them as HTTP request headers to another HttpWebRequest ? Also the original request might have other custom headers set and i want send those also to the other service.

Thank you, Adrya

Answer 1

You can get the headers via

OperationContext.Current.RequestContext.RequestMessage.Headers

You can set the headers via

WebClient.Headers

Example:

WebClient wc = new WebClient();
wc.Headers.Add("referer", "http://yourwebsite.com");
wc.Headers.Add("user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0");

However, understand that some headers are restricted, and cannot be modified freely. These are:

• Accept
• Connection
• Content-Length
• Content-Type
• Date
• Expect
• Host
• If-Modified-Since
• Range
• Referer
• Transfer-Encoding
• User-Agent
• Proxy-Connection

I suppose you should look, case by case, which headers you can/want to replicate from the incoming call to the outgoing one.