StringContent - mediaType Parameter

Question

Does anyone have any idea what the 'mediaType' parameter does for the StringContent's constructor? Nothing is listed on its MSDN page.

Answer 1

Wow, yeah the msdn documentation for that class needs some work.

When you create a new instance of StringContent, it always sets a media type. If you don't specify one, it uses "text/plain"; otherwise, it uses whatever you passed in. (There appears to be some validation done on the value you pass in, but I don't really understand what it's doing.)

That media type value is then used to instantiate a new MediaTypeHeaderValue, which is assigned to your StringContent's Headers.ContentType property.

From the documentation for Headers:

Gets the HTTP content headers as defined in RFC 2616.

The comment on the Content-Type property:

The value of the Content-Type content header on an HTTP response.

So all that to say, it's apparently specifying the HTTP content type.

Here's a full list of types, which is too long to include here. I'm sure there's a list somewhere on MSDN too but I couldn't find one.