[c#] ASP.NET Core form POST results in a HTTP 415 Unsupported Media Type response

Sending a form POST HTTP request (Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded) to the below controller results into a HTTP 415 Unsupported Media Type response.

public class MyController : Controller
{
    [HttpPost]
    public async Task<IActionResult> Submit([FromBody] MyModel model)
    {
        //...
    }
}

Form post HTTP headers:

POST /submit HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com:1337
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 219
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
Origin: https://example.com:1337
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Referer: https://example.com:1337/submit
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,nl;q=0.6

This used to work with ASP.NET MVC 5 on .NET 4.6.

Another trap of note is making sure you're not decorating controllers with the Consume Attribute as below:

[Produces("application/json")]
[Consumes("application/json")]
public class MyController : Controller

This will fail with a 415 Unsupported Media Type if the upload is NOT JSON.

A "friend of mine" was recently caught out by this like so:

public class MyFileUploadController : MyCustomController {

}

[Produces("application/json")]
[Consumes("application/json")]
public class MyCustomController : ControllerBase {

}

In my case 415 Unsupported Media Types was received since I used new FormData() and sent it with axios.post(...) but did not set headers: {content-type: 'multipart/form-data'}. I also had to do the same on the server side:

[Consumes("multipart/form-data")]
public async Task<IActionResult> FileUpload([FromForm] IFormFile formFile) { ... }

In my case, I received the HTTP 415 Unsupported Media Type response, since I specified the content type to be TEXT and NOT JSON, so simply changing the type solved the issue. Please check the solution in more detail in the following blog post: https://www.howtodevelop.net/article/20/unsupported-media-type-415-in-aspnet-core-web-api

This is my case: it's run Environment: AspNet Core 2.1 Controller:

public class MyController
{
    // ...

    [HttpPost]
    public ViewResult Search([FromForm]MySearchModel searchModel)
    {
        // ...
        return View("Index", viewmodel);
    }
}

View:

<form method="post" asp-controller="MyController" asp-action="Search">
    <input name="MySearchModelProperty" id="MySearchModelProperty" />
    <input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

the problem can because of MVC MW.you must set formatterType in MVC options:

services.AddMvc(options =>
            {
                options.UseCustomStringModelBinder();
                options.AllowEmptyInputInBodyModelBinding = true;
                foreach (var formatter in options.InputFormatters)
                {
                    if (formatter.GetType() == typeof(SystemTextJsonInputFormatter))
                        ((SystemTextJsonInputFormatter)formatter).SupportedMediaTypes.Add(
                            Microsoft.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue.Parse("text/plain"));
                }
            }).AddJsonOptions(options =>
            {
                options.JsonSerializerOptions.PropertyNameCaseInsensitive = true;
            });

Follow the below steps:

1. Add to sending request header Content-Type field:

    axios.post(`/Order/`, orderId,
    {
        headers: {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
    })
   

2. Every data (simple or complex type) sent with axios should be placed without any extra brackets (axios.post('/Order/', orderId, ...)).

WARNING! There is one exception for string type - stringify it before send (axios.post('/Order/', JSON.stringify(address), ...)).

3. Add method to controller:

   [HttpPost]
   public async Task<IActionResult> Post([FromBody]int orderId)
   {
       return Ok();
   }
   

"HTTP 415 Unsupported Media Type response" stems from Content-Type in header of your request. for example in javascript by axios:

Axios({
            method: 'post',
            headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json'},
            url: '/',
            data: data,  // an object u want to send
          }).then(function (response) {
            console.log(response);
          });

As addition of good answers, You don't have to use [FromForm] to get form data in controller. Framework automatically convert form data to model as you wish. You can implement like following.

[HttpPost]
public async Task<IActionResult> Submit(MyModel model)
{
    //...
}

You can use [FromBody] but you need to set the Content-Type header of your request to application/json, i.e.

Content-Type: application/json

First you need to specify in the Headers the Content-Type, for example, it can be application/json.

If you set application/json content type, then you need to send a json.

So in the body of your request you will send not form-data, not x-www-for-urlencoded but a raw json, for example {"Username": "user", "Password": "pass"}

You can adapt the example to various content types, including what you want to send.

You can use a tool like Postman or curl to play with this.