How do you do an HTTP Put?

Question

We have this software that has a webservices component.

Now, the administrator of this system has come to me, wanting to import data into the system by using the webs

Answer 1

I found this really cool piece of free software called RESTClient.

It lets you interact with HTTP resources using various verbs, manually setting headers and the body, setting authentication info, ssl, running test scripts, etc.

This will help me to figure out how to interact with our "webservices" software which is really just a RESTful API to the software's database.

Answer 2

"Now, the administrator of this system has come to me, wanting to import data into the system by using the webservices component."

Web services have little to do with HTML forms.

Web services requests are either done from Javascript (e.g., as Ajax) or they're done from your application programs.

You would write a C# or VB program that used HTTP to do a Put to the given web services URL with the given set of data.

Here, for instance, is some sample VB code: http://developer.yahoo.com/dotnet/howto-rest_vb.html#post

Replace the method string of "POST" with "PUT".

Answer 3

PUT and DELETE are not part of HTML4, but are included in the HTML5 specifications. For this reason, most popular browsers don't have good support for them, since they focus on HTML4. However, they are definitely part of HTTP and always have been. You do a PUT using some non-browser client, or using a form in an HTML5-ready browser.

Update: PUT and DELETE are no longer part of HTML5 for forms. See: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/association-of-controls-and-forms.html#attr-fs-method

Answer 4

Here's a C# example using HttpWebRequest:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;

class Test
{
        static void Main()
        {
                string xml = "<xml>...</xml>";
                byte[] arr = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(xml);
                HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create("http://localhost/");
                request.Method = "PUT";
                request.ContentType = "text/xml";
                request.ContentLength = arr.Length;
                Stream dataStream = request.GetRequestStream();
                dataStream.Write(arr, 0, arr.Length);
                dataStream.Close();
                HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
                string returnString = response.StatusCode.ToString();
                Console.WriteLine(returnString);
        }
}

Update: there's now an HttpClient class in System.Net.Http (available as a NuGet package) that makes this a bit easier:

using System;
using System.Net.Http;

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        var client = new HttpClient();
        var content = new StringContent("<xml>...</xml>");
        var response = client.PutAsync("http://localhost/", content).Result;
        Console.WriteLine(response.StatusCode);
    }
}

Answer 5

Just a headsup some network admins block puts for various reasons. So you may have to use a POST instead of PUT. Check with your operations.

Answer 6

Here is how to do it in CURL: How to Use cURL to Test RESTful Rails

Or...you can definitely use an HTML form. If the app is truly RESTful, it will understand the REST actions and only let you perform certain actions based on the method you use.