Testing our asp.net mvc-5 Post action method using RESTClient firefox plugin, am i doing thing correcty?

Question

I have the following Post action method inside my asp.net mvc-5 which accept username & password, and it acts as an api end point for our web application:

[HttpPost]  
public ActionResult UserInfo(string username, string password)  
{  

and I am testing it using FireFox RESTCleint add-in, where I am passing the URL + the Header as application/x-www-form-urlencoded + the username/password, as follows:

now i have noted the following 2 issues/observations, that i need to understand:-

1) if i remove the Header "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" >> the Post action method will be called but the parameters will be null..

2) since the password can contain characters such as "&" so i url encoded the parameters values before submitting them and it worked. so i can pass & as part of a parameter value.. but if i url encode the whole query string including the parameter names + the "&" for applying multiple parameters + the parameters values, then the action method will be called but the parameters values will be null..

any advice on the above please? thanks

Answer 1

When passing form values as url encoding, only the names and values are encoded. The = and & are not.

Answer 2

Hi @john john ,

if i remove the Header "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" >> the Post action method will be called but the parameters will be null.

Did you choose another option when you removed this header? For example: none, or form-data or raw? Because at this point, I don't quite understand why it works correctly in your case. Under my test, it cannot call the post method unless I add parameters. like this:

And this can get correct parameter like this:

On this point, can you clarify it so that we can better understand your current question?

In addition, if you need to pass multiple parameters, you can encapsulate it in a DTO (Data Transfer Object), which already contains all the parameters that need to be passed. Like this:

   public class User  
       {  
           public string username { get; set; }  
           public string password { get; set; }  
       }  

And in controller, it should be :

   [HttpPost]  
   public ActionResult UserInfo(User userInfo)  
   {  

Best regards,
Xudong Peng

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