Set body
APPLIES TO: All API Management tiers
Use the set-body
policy to set the message body for a request or response. To access the message body you can use the context.Request.Body
property or the context.Response.Body
, depending on whether the policy is in the inbound or outbound section.
Important
By default when you access the message body using context.Request.Body
or context.Response.Body
, the original message body is lost and must be set by returning the body back in the expression. To preserve the body content, set the preserveContent
parameter to true
when accessing the message. If preserveContent
is set to true
and a different body is returned by the expression, the returned body is used.
Note
Set the policy's elements and child elements in the order provided in the policy statement. Learn more about how to set or edit API Management policies.
Policy statement
<set-body template="liquid" xsi-nil="blank | null" parse-date="true | false">
new body value as text
</set-body>
Attributes
Attribute | Description | Required | Default |
---|---|---|---|
template | Used to change the templating mode that the set-body policy runs in. Currently the only supported value is:- liquid - the set-body policy will use the liquid templating engine |
No | N/A |
xsi-nil | Used to control how elements marked with xsi:nil="true" are represented in XML payloads. Set to one of the following values:- blank - nil is represented with an empty string.- null - nil is represented with a null value.Policy expressions aren't allowed. |
No | blank |
parse-date | Boolean. Specifies whether date-formatted strings (for example, "/Date(1198908717056)/" , "2012-03-21T05:40Z" ) are parsed to System.DateTime (mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss ). When set to false , date values are simply copied.Policy expressions aren't allowed. |
No | true |
For accessing information about the request and response, the Liquid template can bind to a context object with the following properties:
context. Request. Url Method OriginalMethod OriginalUrl IpAddress MatchedParameters HasBody ClientCertificates Headers Response. StatusCode Method Headers Url. Scheme Host Port Path Query QueryString ToUri ToString OriginalUrl. Scheme Host Port Path Query QueryString ToUri ToString
Usage
- Policy sections: inbound, outbound, backend
- Policy scopes: global, workspace, product, API, operation
- Gateways: classic, v2, consumption, self-hosted, workspace
Usage notes
- If you're using the
set-body
policy to return a new or updated body, you don't need to setpreserveContent
totrue
because you're explicitly supplying the new body contents. - Preserving the content of a response in the inbound pipeline doesn't make sense because there's no response yet.
- Preserving the content of a request in the outbound pipeline doesn't make sense because the request has already been sent to the backend at this point.
- If this policy is used when there's no message body, for example in an inbound
GET
, an exception is thrown.
For more information, see the context.Request.Body
, context.Response.Body
, and the IMessageBody
sections in the Context variable table.
Using Liquid templates with set-body
The set-body
policy can be configured to use the Liquid templating language to transform the body of a request or response. This can be effective if you need to completely reshape the format of your message.
Important
The implementation of Liquid used in the set-body
policy is configured in 'C# mode'. This is particularly important when doing things such as filtering. As an example, using a date filter requires the use of Pascal casing and C# date formatting e.g.:
{{body.foo.startDateTime| Date:"yyyyMMddTHH:mm:ssZ"}}
Important
In order to correctly bind to an XML body using the Liquid template, use a set-header
policy to set Content-Type to either application/xml, text/xml (or any type ending with +xml); for a JSON body, it must be application/json, text/json (or any type ending with +json).
Important
Liquid templates use the request/response body in the current execution pipeline as their input. For this reason, liquid templates do not work when used inside a return-response policy. A return-response policy cancels the current execution pipeline and removes the request/response body. As a result, any liquid template used inside the return-response will receive an empty string as its input and will not produced the expected output.
Supported Liquid filters
The following Liquid filters are supported in the set-body
policy. For filter examples, see the Liquid documentation.
Note
The policy requires Pascal casing for Liquid filter names (for example, "AtLeast" instead of "at_least").
- Abs
- Append
- AtLeast
- AtMost
- Capitalize
- Compact
- Currency
- Date
- Default
- DividedBy
- Downcase
- Escape
- First
- H
- Join
- Last
- Lstrip
- Map
- Minus
- Modulo
- NewlineToBr
- Plus
- Prepend
- Remove
- RemoveFirst
- Replace
- ReplaceFirst
- Round
- Rstrip
- Size
- Slice
- Sort
- Split
- Strip
- StripHtml
- StripNewlines
- Times
- Truncate
- TruncateWords
- Uniq
- Upcase
- UrlDecode
- UrlEncode
Examples
Literal text
<set-body>Hello world!</set-body>
Accessing the body as a string
We're preserving the original request body so that we can access it later in the pipeline.
<set-body>
@{
string inBody = context.Request.Body.As<string>(preserveContent: true);
if (inBody[0] =='c') {
inBody[0] = 'm';
}
return inBody;
}
</set-body>
Accessing the body as a JObject
Since we're not reserving the original request body, accessing it later in the pipeline will result in an exception.
<set-body>
@{
JObject inBody = context.Request.Body.As<JObject>();
if (inBody.attribute == <tag>) {
inBody[0] = 'm';
}
return inBody.ToString();
}
</set-body>
Filter response based on product
This example shows how to perform content filtering by removing data elements from the response received from a backend service when using the Starter
product. The example backend response includes root-level properties similar to the OpenWeather One Call API.
<!-- Copy this snippet into the outbound section to remove a number of data elements from the response received from the backend service based on the name of the product -->
<choose>
<when condition="@(context.Response.StatusCode == 200 && context.Product.Name.Equals("Starter"))">
<set-body>@{
var response = context.Response.Body.As<JObject>();
foreach (var key in new [] {"current", "minutely", "hourly", "daily", "alerts"}) {
response.Property (key).Remove ();
}
return response.ToString();
}
</set-body>
</when>
</choose>
Convert JSON to SOAP using a Liquid template
<set-body template="liquid">
<soap:Envelope xmlns="http://tempuri.org/" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
<soap:Body>
<GetOpenOrders>
<cust>{{body.getOpenOrders.cust}}</cust>
</GetOpenOrders>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>
</set-body>
Transform JSON using a Liquid template
<set-body template="liquid">
{
"order": {
"id": "{{body.customer.purchase.identifier}}",
"summary": "{{body.customer.purchase.orderShortDesc}}"
}
}
</set-body>
Access the body as URL-encoded form data
The following example uses the AsFormUrlEncodedContent()
expression to access the request body as URL-encoded form data (content type application/x-www-form-urlencoded
), and then converts it to JSON. Since we're not reserving the original request body, accessing it later in the pipeline will result in an exception.
<set-body>
@{
var inBody = context.Request.Body.AsFormUrlEncodedContent();
return JsonConvert.SerializeObject(inBody);
}
</set-body>
Access and return body as URL-encoded form data
The following example uses the AsFormUrlEncodedContent()
expression to access the request body as URL-encoded form data (content type application/x-www-form-urlencoded
), adds data to the payload, and returns URL-encoded form data. Since we're not reserving the original request body, accessing it later in the pipeline will result in an exception.
<set-body>
@{
var body = context.Request.Body.AsFormUrlEncodedContent();
body["newKey"].Add("newValue");
return body.ToFormUrlEncodedContent();
}
</set-body>
Related policies
Related content
For more information about working with policies, see:
- Tutorial: Transform and protect your API
- Policy reference for a full list of policy statements and their settings
- Policy expressions
- Set or edit policies
- Reuse policy configurations
- Policy snippets repo
- Azure API Management policy toolkit
- Author policies using Microsoft Copilot in Azure