Unable to read input stream

Question

I am using ActionFilterAttribute to get the request before hitting the controller as below :

 public override void OnActionExecuting(HttpActionContext actionContext)
 {
     using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
     {
        HttpContextBase context = (HttpContextBase)actionContext.Request.Properties["MS_HttpContext"];
        context.Request.InputStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
        context.Request.InputStream.CopyTo(stream);
        requestBody = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stream.ToArray());
     }
 }

The above method is working for small request but for a large json it is giving me this error :

Either BinaryRead, Form, Files, or InputStream was accessed before the internal storage was filled by the caller of HttpRequest.GetBufferedInputStream.

And the input stream gives this error

context.Request.InputStream threw an exception of type System.InvalidOperationException System.IO.Stream {System.InvalidOperationException}

As I found in my research that it is an issue with the timeout but I am unable to change the timeout in the code. I tried changing the values in the web.config file maxRequestLength="102400000" and maxAllowedContentLength="209715100" but still I am facing the same error.
If I read the GetBufferedInputStream but still same issue it is reading just a part of the buffer, not the entire stream.

I also tried the below :

 Stream InStream;
 int Len;
 InStream = HttpContext.Current.Request.InputStream;
 Len = System.Convert.ToInt32(InStream.Length);
 byte[] ByteArray = new byte[Len + 1];
 InStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
 InStream.Read(ByteArray, 0, Len);
 var jsonParam = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ByteArray); 

Note that if I set the content type application/xml or application/x-www-form-urlencoded it works, but if I set it to application/json it gives me this error!!

Please advise!

Answer 1

There are couple of points:

First, if you try and read 0 bytes from a stream, then it will throw a System.InvalidOperationException exception. So, I will change your code like below and add a check for ContentLength > 0.

using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
     {
        HttpContextBase context = (HttpContextBase)actionContext.Request.Properties["MS_HttpContext"];
        if(context.Request.Contentlength > 0)
        {
            context.Request.InputStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
            context.Request.InputStream.CopyTo(stream);
            requestBody = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stream.ToArray());
        }
     }

Also, I once experienced the same issue and increasing the maxRequestLength in web.config seems to have resolved the issue. This link further provides more info here