Azure Service Bus GetBody<Stream> encoding cannot be determined - c#-4.0

Question

I'm trying to get a BrokeredMessage from AzureServiceBus in a .NET client and choose how to deal with the message based on the type of message coming in, but ContentType and other message properties are not set.
My test message sending looks like this:
var client =
QueueClient.CreateFromConnectionString(connectionString, queueName);
var message = new BrokeredMessage("test");
client.Send(message);
My code to receive is using GetBody so that I can inspect the serialized data and decide how to deal with it:
var stream = message.GetBody<Stream>();
string s = null;
using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(stream))
{
s = sr.ReadToEnd();
}
The problem is that "s" above ends up with what looks like it should be XML created from a DataContractSerializer, but it is strangely encoded. I've tried many encodings on the receiving side and none seem to get me valid xml. Example results:
#string3http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/�test
I see the serialization namespace and what looks like it should start with <string, but as you can see I'm getting control characters. Does any one know how I can try to get the serialized data here as valid XML so I can dynamically handle it?
TIA for any help.
To be really clear I want to test the body so I can do something like:
if (BodyIsString(s)) { do something }
if (BodyIsPerson(s)) { do something else }
If I could getbody twice this would be really easy.

Answer 1

As Sean Feldman mentioned when send message is string type we could use
var body = message.GetBody<string>();
to get message body, after I decompile the WindowsAzure.ServiceBus.dll then get the code:
public T GetBody<T>()
{
if (typeof (T) == typeof (Stream))
{
this.SetGetBodyCalled();
return (T) this.BodyStream;
}
if (!this.bodyObjectDecoded || this.bodyObject == null)
return this.GetBody<T>((XmlObjectSerializer) new DataContractBinarySerializer(typeof (T)));
this.SetGetBodyCalled();
return (T) this.bodyObject;
}
I find that if the send message
is not Stream type it will be DataContractBinarySerializer. so we also could get the message body with following way
var stream = message.GetBody<Stream>();
var messageBody = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(string)).ReadObject(XmlDictionaryReader.CreateBinaryReader(stream, XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas.Max));
From the decompiled code we could know that if we send the stream message, we could get the message body with the way you mentioned.
Send stream message code :
var client = QueueClient.CreateFromConnectionString(connectionString, queueName);
var byteArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("test stream");
MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(byteArray);
client.Send(new BrokeredMessage(stream));
then receive message as you mentioned it should work:
var stream = message.GetBody<Stream>();
string s = null;
using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(stream))
{
s = sr.ReadToEnd();
}
Edit :According to update question:
If I could getbody twice this would be really easy.
we could clone the BrokerMessage
var newMessage = receiveMessage.Clone();
Edit2:
We also can get the message Properties to know the body type if we set it during sending. Take Label for example:
var message = new BrokeredMessage(object);
message.Label = "Type of message body";
client.Send(message);
While we receive the message we could get the message Label value then select the corresponding way to get the body.

Answer 2

You passed your payload as a string
var message = new BrokeredMessage("test");
therefore it was serialized as a string. Upon receive you should get the body as a string as well in the following manner:
var body = message.GetBody<string>();
You would use Stream if you'd actually construct your brokered message using a stream.