SharePoint 2013 Search Rest API POST request format

Question

I am hoping to save someone some time as I couldn't find anyone talking about this anywhere.

I am looking at the SharePoint 2013 Search Rest API documentation and decided to switch my GET calls to POST to clean up code and allow for more complicated queries I foresee having to write.

Looking at this article, I build the queries to send to /_api/search/postquery.

After building a query similar to my GET one:

{
__metadata : {'type' : 'Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.REST.SearchRequest'},
'Querytext':'alan',
'SelectProperties': { 'results':['Title,PictureURL'] },
'rowlimit':5,
'SourceId': 'b09a7990-05ea-4af9-81ef-edfab16c4e31'
}

And solving this interesting issue.

I am now getting an error:

The parameter __metadata does not exist in method postquery

What am I missing?

Answer 1

The correct format for the Rest API POST Search Query is:

{
  'request': {
    '__metadata' : {
      'type' : 'Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.REST.SearchRequest'
    },
    'Querytext': 'query'
  }
}

I found an example here in the second image.