How to send data over POST without URI in WCF rest services

Question

I am new to WCF. I am trying to implement a restful service for authentication.

My WCF Code is as below.

    [OperationContract]
    [WebInvoke(Method="POST", UriTemplate = "auth", RequestFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, BodyStyle=WebMessageBodyStyle.Wrapped)]
    Employee authEmployee(String username, String password);

What I need to do here is get username and password without receiving it via URL. How do I achieve this?

This might be a basic question for experts, but I am new to this. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I'll rewrite my comments here for clarity.

Your client side should call service method by creating request and setting properly request fields, for example

HttpWebRequest req =(HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(uri);

req.Method = "Post"; 
req.ContentType = "application/json";
byte[] bodyBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("{\"Name\":\"John Doe\",\"Age\":33}");

req.GetRequestStream().Write(bodyBytes, 0, bodyBytes.Length);  
req.GetRequestStream().Close();

and of course

resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();

in that way consumer has to pass values but that values do not travel directly through url

I think that method name is passed in URI and only attributes that this method needs are passed inside json.

Answer 2

{ "action": "Authenticate", "attributes": { "AccountName": "admin", "Password": "password" } }. This is how client is sending data. So should I have 3 arguments in my service method? for Action, AccountName and Password?

In this case your service operation should look like this:

Employee authEmployee(string action, attributes attr);

Define the attributes type as:

class attributes
{
    string AccountName { get; set; }
    string Password { get; set; }
} 

As a side note, it's not particularly secure if you're passing credentials in as plaintext in this manner.