Using PUT and DELETE in WCF web services

I’ve been doing a little work on a web page that needs to grab some data from a web service and then update that data via PUT and DELETE requests. I haven’t got access to the web service currently so decided to write my own dummy implementation using WCF.

The first problem I encountered was that by default PUT and DELETE calls won’t be allowed at all by IIS. This can be resolved by fiddling with the Handler Mappings options in IIS7 to allow the required verbs, as shown on the left.

My next problem was that I wanted to use the same URL for both PUT and DELETE requests. The WebInvoke attribute that is applied to your WCF method doesn’t support multiple HTTP verbs, so I was a little stumped at this point. The solution is actually pretty straightforward, have multiple methods pointing to the same URL, like so

[WebInvoke(Method = "DELETE", UriTemplate = "EditFolder")]
public void DeleteFolder(Stream input)

This is actually probably a good restriction by WCF. If you want different verb types on the same URL, the chances are that you have two different operations anyway.