In our previous post, “What Problem Does HTTP QUERY Solve?”, we looked at the challenges of submitting large payloads to a web server given the constraints of the GET method, as well as a solution to the same, the QUERY method.

In this post we, will look at the situation of where we need to solve the problem of passing an object to the web server while still using a GET request.

As a recap, our payload looks like this:

{
  "SearchText": "conrad",
  "SortColumn": "Name",
  "PageNumber": 0,
  "PageSize": 20,
  "Database": "Animals",
  "ActiveOnly": true
}

We start by mapping this into a class to represent the object:

public sealed class SearchRequest
{
  public required string SearchText { get; init; }
  public required string SortColumn { get; init; }
  public required int PageNumber { get; init; }
  public required int PageSize { get; init; }
  public required string Database { get; init; }
  public required bool ActiveOnly { get; init; }
}

The code would look like this:

var req = new SearchRequest
{
  SearchText = "conrad",
  SortColumn = "Name",
  PageNumber = 0,
  PageSize = 50,
  Database = "Animals",
  ActiveOnly = true
};

// Get the data in bytes
var byteData = JsonSerializer.SerializeToUtf8Bytes(req);
// Convert to a URL representable string
var encodedByteData = Base64Url.EncodeToString(byteData);

This generates a string like this:

eyJTZWFyY2hUZXh0IjoiY29ucmFkIiwiU29ydENvbHVtbiI6Ik5hbWUiLCJQYWdlTnVtYmVyIjowLCJQYWdlU2l6ZSI6NTAsIkRhdGFiYXNlIjoiQW5pbWFscyIsIkFjdGl2ZU9ubHkiOnRydWV9

Finally, we construct our request:

// Create HttpClient
var client = new HttpClient();
// Submit request
var response = await client.GetAsync($"https://localhost:7117/Search/{encodedByteData}");

This is ultimately what gets submitted

https://localhost:7117/Search/eyJTZWFyY2hUZXh0IjoiY29ucmFkIiwiU29ydENvbHVtbiI6Ik5hbWUiLCJQYWdlTnVtYmVyIjowLCJQYWdlU2l6ZSI6NTAsIkRhdGFiYXNlIjoiQW5pbWFscyIsIkFjdGl2ZU9ubHkiOnRydWV9

Alternatively, we can use a QueryString approach like so:

// Create HttpClient
var client = new HttpClient();
// Submit request
var response = await client.GetAsync($"https://localhost:7117/Search/query={encodedByteData}");

https://localhost:7117/Search/query=eyJTZWFyY2hUZXh0IjoiY29ucmFkIiwiU29ydENvbHVtbiI6Ik5hbWUiLCJQYWdlTnVtYmVyIjowLCJQYWdlU2l6ZSI6NTAsIkRhdGFiYXNlIjoiQW5pbWFscyIsIkFjdGl2ZU9ubHkiOnRydWV9

On the server side, we can do the reverse to retrieve our data:

// Decode data back to a byte array
var data = Base64Url.DecodeFromChars(encodedByteData);
// Deserialize byte array to an object
var request = JsonSerializer.Deserialize<SearchRequest>(data);

Here, encodedByteData we are fetching from the URL.

TLDR

You can write code to encode and post JSON over GET, as well as decode and process the same.

The code is in my GitHub.

Happy hacking!