Error while reading body of request message

Question

I need to read content of message in WCF project like

 var messageContent = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(OperationContext.Current.RequestContext.RequestMessage.GetBody<byte[]>());

But in result I got an error:

Expecting element 'base64Binary' from namespace 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/'.. Encountered 'Element' with name 'Human', namespace 'http://numans.hr-xml.org/2007-04-15'.

Can you please suggest me what Im doing wrong?

Content that I'm sending are:

<Human xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://numans.hr-xml.org/2007-04-15">
  <HumanId>
    <guid>c2ee9a7e-c7a8-48e0-910b-47c2012bfa8e</guid>
  </HumanId>
  ...
</Human>

Also I tried to read content like:

var messageContent = OperationContext.Current.RequestContext.RequestMessage.ToString();

Result of messageContent:

...stream...

Answer 1

GetBody<T> is used to deserialize the message body as type T. So when you call GetBody<byte[]>(), the deserializer expects base64-encoded binary data but finds the <Human> element.

If you only want to read the message body as string, use GetReaderAtBodyContents which returns an XmlDictionaryReader, at which you can use ReadOuterXml().

If you want to read the body as typed content, create a Human class from its XML representation and use GetBody<Human>().