restsharp accept-encoding disabling compression

Question

In a particular case I need to be able to disable compression in the requst/response.

Using Firefox RestClient I am able to post some xml to a web service and get some response xml successfully with a single header parameter "Accept-Encoding" : " " which if I do not set this header, the response body would come back compressed with some binary data in the response body(that's why I want to disable gzip in response)

Now using the same header value in my app (using RestSharp in C#), I still get the binary data (gzip) in response.

Can someone please shed some light? Is it supported in RestSharp?

Answer 1

RestSharp does not support disabling compression.

If you look at the source code in Http.Sync.cs line 267 (assuming a sync request, async has the same code duplicated in Http.Async.cs line 424)

webRequest.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.Deflate | DecompressionMethods.GZip | DecompressionMethods.None;

that is, the underlying WebRequest that Restsharp uses to make the http call has the compression options hardcoded. There is an open issue that documents this

Answer 2

The feature (only just) seems to have been added, but stealthily - without a note on the issue's status nor on the changelogs. Possibly as it hasn't been sufficiently tested?

Nevertheless I recently had a need for this functionality and tested it - and it works. Just set the RestClient instance's AutomaticDecompression property to false.

If you intend to keep your RestClient instance long-lived remember to do this before its first use - the setting seems to be 'locked in' after use and cannot change after. In my case I needed to make calls with and without AutomaticDecompression so i simply created two different RestClient instances.