xml - 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 webservices component.

So, I went to read the documentation to try to figure this thing out and I am seeing things like this:

Click here to see what I'm talking about (this looks best in firefox, chrome, & safari)

That documentation gives examples of interacting with the system using HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE. But in my limited experience, I have never had to send neither an HTTP PUT nor a DELETE.

How do you do it? I have built HTML forms that have method="post" or method="get" and the request is sent to whatever is specified in the action attribute (action="someResource"). But I don't really know what to do with this PUT thing.

If I had to guess, I would have to build an application that creates some sort of an HTTP Request object and set all the properties of it and somehow include the data I want to PUT to the RESOURCE (I am trying to use REST terminology, which is something else is very new to me). Then I would send the request using my programming language and blah blah blah. I am just speculating on this. Please offer up some assistance!

I thought that I was a web developer, since I know things like XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. but it's starting to look like I don't know anything about the foundations of the web at all (HTTP).

EDIT

PS: I program mostly with .net. So, any examples in .net would be pretty awesome.

Answer 1

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);
    }
}