In ASP.Net Web API, how do you fake PUT and DELETE?

asp.net-web-api, http-delete, http-put, rest

Solution

You can easily achieve this using a `DelegatingHandler`.

So you would code:

public class HttpMethodHandler : DelegatingHandler
{
    protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        var queryString = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(request.RequestUri.Query);
        if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(queryString["_method"]))
        {
            request.Method = new HttpMethod(queryString["_method"]);
        }
        return base.SendAsync(request, cancellationToken);
    }
}

And then add the handler to the pipeline. I have a blog on that.

Problem

I'm experimenting with ASP.Net Web API, which, by convention, splits controller methods into a Restful style of Get(), Put, Post and Delete. My question is how does one handle the PUT and DELETE requests that might come from a non-Ajax browser request. So, let's say that I have foobar with id = 123. A normal fetch request would be ``` /foobars/123 ``` To delete the item, the Restful way would be to issue: ``` DELETE /foobars/123 ``` However, `PUT` and `DELETE` are not browser standards and do not have enough major browser support to be trusted if your request is coming from a non-Ajax browser request. So a common accepted workaround is: ``` POST /foobars/123?_method=DELETE (source: Restful Web Services) ``` For the new ASP.Net Web API, is there a best practice / common approach for working with this problem? What I want is for anything with a `_method=DELETE` to be routed to the `DELETE()` method in the controller and `_method=PUT` to be routed to the PUT() method of a controller.

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