ASP.Net WebAPI在不同的用户代理中具有不同的内容类型

Question

I am trying to learn ASP.Net WebAPI, and I am having a hard time figuring out what is going on. I created a small application that contains an action like this:

public IHttpActionResult Hello() 
{
    return Ok("Hi");
}

This works fine, so I look at it in the browser. I see:

<string xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/">Hi</string>

This is using Chrome. I use an extension to see the content type and it is text/xml . I want to check things out further so I use Postman REST Client to test it. There I see: "Hi" and the content type is application/json . I am completely confused. I figured that Postman was just changing the content type, but to be sure I installed another REST client but it returned application/json . In Internet Explorer it attempts to download the result as a JSON file. What the heck is going on. Is there a way I can have a universal content type?

Answer 1

Web api can serialise responses to Xml or Json. It reads the Content-Type Http header to determine which one. Use fiddler to examine requests from the brower. Postman passes application/json as the content type by default - so you get the json response.

You can add the following code to your WebApiConfig file to remove the XML serialiser and it will always return json.

var appXmlType = config.Formatters.XmlFormatter.SupportedMediaTypes.FirstOrDefault(t => t.MediaType == "application/xml");
    config.Formatters.XmlFormatter.SupportedMediaTypes.Remove(appXmlType);