I am creating a RESTful Web Service using ASP.NET MVC 4 Web API. For API access, I am returning JSON, though once I get everything working correctly, the content negotiation should work for XML and JSON by default.
Since I am working towards a truly RESTful resource-centric web service, my URI's will be pointing to actual resources. I would like to take advantage of that by returning an HTML representation of the resource if Accepts: text/html
comes in the request (like throwing the link in a browser).
I would like to be able to take advantage of MVC 4 Web API's content negotiation to insert a renderer for text/html that uses Razor templates. Are there any working examples of doing just this?
Yes, this is bridging "regular" MVC pages and Web API. Basically I'd like to create a renderer that uses a convention based approach to finding and rendering Razor views just like "regular" MVC. I can come up with the convention-based view lookup logic. I'm simply looking for a) globally inserting my text/html
renderer into the content negotation, and b) using the Razor engine manually to render my model into HTML.
Fredrik Normén has a blog post on this very topic:
http://weblogs.asp.net/fredriknormen/archive/2012/06/28/using-razor-together-with-asp-net-web-api.aspx
Basically, you need to create a MediaTypeFormatter
using System;
using System.Net.Http.Formatting;
namespace WebApiRazor.Models
{
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Http.Headers;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using RazorEngine;
public class RazorFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter
{
public RazorFormatter()
{
SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new MediaTypeHeaderValue("text/html"));
SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/xhtml+xml"));
}
//...
public override Task WriteToStreamAsync(
Type type,
object value,
Stream stream,
HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders,
TransportContext transportContext)
{
var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
var viewPath = // Get path to the view by the name of the type
var template = File.ReadAllText(viewPath);
Razor.Compile(template, type, type.Name);
var razor = Razor.Run(type.Name, value);
var buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(razor);
stream.Write(buf, 0, buf.Length);
stream.Flush();
});
return task;
}
}
}
and then register it in Global.asax:
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(new RazorFormatter());
the above code is copied from the blog post and is not my work
You might take a look at WebApiContrib.Formatting.Razor. It's very similar to Kyle's answer, however it's a full-blown open source project with more features, unit tests, etc. You can get it on NuGet as well.
I will say it definitely needs more features, but they seem to have designed it well so it would be very easy to contribute to it.