Making a PowerShell POST request if a body param starts with '@'

Question

You should be able to do the following:

$params = @{"@type"="login";
 "username"="[email protected]";
 "password"="yyy";
}

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri http://foobar.com/endpoint -Method POST -Body $params

This will send the post as the body. However - if you want to post this as a Json you might want to be explicit. To post this as a JSON you can specify the ContentType and convert the body to Json by using

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri http://foobar.com/endpoint -Method POST -Body ($params|ConvertTo-Json) -ContentType "application/json"

Extra: You can also use the Invoke-RestMethod for dealing with JSON and REST apis (which will save you some extra lines for de-serializing)

Use Invoke-RestMethod to consume REST-APIs. Save the JSON to a string and use that as the body, ex:

$JSON = @'
{"@type":"login",
 "username":"[email protected]",
 "password":"yyy"
}
'@

$response = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "http://somesite.com/oneendpoint" -Method Post -Body $JSON -ContentType "application/json"

If you use Powershell 3, I know there have been some issues with Invoke-RestMethod, but you should be able to use Invoke-WebRequest as a replacement:

$response = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://somesite.com/oneendpoint" -Method Post -Body $JSON -ContentType "application/json"

If you don't want to write your own JSON every time, you can use a hashtable and use PowerShell to convert it to JSON before posting it. Ex.

$JSON = @{
    "@type" = "login"
    "username" = "[email protected]"
    "password" = "yyy"
} | ConvertTo-Json

@Frode F. gave the right answer.

By the Way Invoke-WebRequest also prints you the 200 OK and a lot of bla, bla, bla... which might be useful but I still prefer the Invoke-RestMethod which is lighter.

Also, keep in mind that you need to use | ConvertTo-Json for the body only, not the header:

$body = @{
 "UserSessionId"="12345678"
 "OptionalEmail"="[email protected]"
} | ConvertTo-Json

$header = @{
 "Accept"="application/json"
 "connectapitoken"="97fe6ab5b1a640909551e36a071ce9ed"
 "Content-Type"="application/json"
} 

Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "http://MyServer/WSVistaWebClient/RESTService.svc/member/search" -Method 'Post' -Body $body -Headers $header | ConvertTo-HTML

and you can then append a | ConvertTo-HTML at the end of the request for better readability