ServiceStack returns 405 on OPTIONS request

Question

I'm building a REST webservice using ServiceStack. I want to allow cross-domain request, so I registered the CorsFeature plugin.

My AppHost looks as follows:

public class HomeAppHost : AppHostHttpListenerBase 
{
    public Context Context { get; set; }

    public HomeAppHost(Context context)
        : base("HomeAutomation", typeof(HomeInterfaceService).Assembly)
    {
        Context = context;
    }

    public override void Configure(Funq.Container container)
    {
        Plugins.Add(new CorsFeature());

        Routes
            .Add<HomeInterface>("/HomeInterface")
            .Add<HomeInterface>("/HomeInterface/{Id}")
            .Add<ViewModel>("/ViewModel")
            .Add<FunctionInput>("/Function")
        ;
    }
}

Then, when an OPTIONS request is made to the service, it results in a 405 Method Not Allowed:

Request:

OPTIONS /Function HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:1337
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0 FirePHP/0.7.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: nl,en-us;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1
Origin: http://localhost
Access-Control-Request-Method: POST
Access-Control-Request-Headers: content-type
x-insight: activate
Connection: keep-alive
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

Response:

HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed
Content-Length: 1837
Content-Type: application/xml
Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:19:33 GMT

Edit

---

Adding an empty Options method to the service does indeed prevent the 405 from being triggered. However, the response seems to be empty:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2013 08:44:21 GMT

Adding the following also gives me an empty response:

RequestFilters.Add((httpReq, httpRes, requestDto) =>
{
    //Handles Request and closes Responses after emitting global HTTP Headers
    if (httpReq.HttpMethod == "OPTIONS")
        httpRes.End();
});

I had to change httpReq.Method to httpReq.HttpMethod and httpRes.EndServiceStackRequest() to httpRes.End(). Is this correct?

Answer 1

405 in ServiceStack means that method has not been implemented.

So you need to add a handler for the Options verb. The method body can be empty, e.g:

public MyService : Service 
{ 
    public void Options(HomeInterface request) {}
}

If you wanted to allow all Options requests (i.e. regardless of which service it is), you can register a global request filter like:

this.RequestFilters.Add((httpReq, httpRes, requestDto) => {
   //Handles Request and closes Responses after emitting global HTTP Headers
    if (httpReq.Method == "OPTIONS") 
        httpRes.EndServiceStackRequest();
});

You can use the same logic in Filter Attributes if you want more fine-grained control over how Option requests are handled.

Answer 2

Not sure whether this is the right way to go, but I'm now handling the CORS myself using a request filter:

RequestFilters.Add((httpReq, httpRes, requestDto) =>
{
    httpRes.AddHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");

    if (httpReq.HttpMethod == "OPTIONS")
    {
        httpRes.AddHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "POST, GET, OPTIONS");
        httpRes.AddHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "X-Requested-With, Content-Type");
        httpRes.End();
    }
});

Answer 3

I was a bit confused about this behavior. Did not wanted to make dummy Options() methods on every service and add fake routes on every Dto class. All I've needed - that ServiceStack AppHost responsed for EVERY 'OPTIONS' request, on every url, with same behavior. So this is what I've ended with.

Created my own handler for Options:

public class OptionsRequestHandler : IHttpHandler, IServiceStackHttpHandler
{
    public bool IsReusable
    {
        get { return true; }
    }

    public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
    {
        ProcessRequest(null, new HttpResponseWrapper(context.Response), null);          
    }

    public void ProcessRequest(IHttpRequest httpReq, IHttpResponse httpRes, string operationName)
    {
        httpRes.EndServiceStackRequest();
        return;
    }
}

Then added it in host Configure method:

this.CatchAllHandlers.Add((httpMethod, pathInfo, filePath) =>
{
    if ("OPTIONS".Equals(httpMethod, System.StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
        return new OptionsRequestHandler();
    else return null;
});

And surely did not forget the CorsFeature:

host.Plugins.Add(new ServiceStack.ServiceInterface.Cors.CorsFeature());

So this way ServiceStack responds with "200 OK" on every request with "OPTIONS" header, regardless of url, dto and service declarations.