Simplest way to access POST data after model binding (Web API)

I am currently in the process of writing a C# wrapper for Kik and needed a way to dump the raw POST body when their service made a callback to one of my WebAPI controllers (after model binding had occurred). After some Googling I found a posting on Stackoverflow (unfortunately I didn’t bookmark the link) which had a creative solution to the problem by making use of a DelegatingHandler.

public class PostPreserverHandler : DelegatingHandler
{
    protected override async Task SendAsync(
        HttpRequestMessage request,
        CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        if (request.Content == null)
            return await base.SendAsync(request, cancellationToken);

        var body = await request.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
        request.Properties["body"] = body;

        return await base.SendAsync(request, cancellationToken);
    }
}

Which simply gets added to your WebAPI Register() method like so:

config.MessageHandlers.Add(new PostPreserverHandler());

And can be accessed from within a controller like this:

Request.Properties["body"]

Thanks so much for the solution mystery contributor!