Enabling ASP.NET Web Api to accommodate both JSON and Form encoded data

Question

I have an ASP.NET web api built into my MVC application and it currently receives all data accompanying a request as form encoded data.

I receive this as a FormDataCollection object and parse like so:

public string Post(FormDataCollection data)
{
    var first = data.Get("FirstName");
    //for every supported field.
}

My response is always a JSON string.

This is fine and I want to continue to accomodate this, however I'd like my users to be able to send a JSON with content type header application/JSON as well so that I can support both.

How do I accommodate both in a simple way? Will it have to involve checking the content header and having different code to extract the attributes in each case?

Answer 1

Let the asp.net model binder handle the bindings for you. Define a class that will represent your model:

public class Person
{
  public string Firsname{ get; set; }
}

then have your controller action take this view model as argument:

public class PersonController : ApiController
{

  public void Post(Person model)
  {
    ...
  }
}

Finally you can post using jquery ajax or whatever you pick. eg

$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: '/api/person',
cache: false,
contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
data: JSON.stringify({ Firstname: "John Doe" }),
success: function() {
    ...    
   }
});

Answer 2

Try using a model class like below;

public class MyTargetModel
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
}

public string Post(MyTargetModel model)
{
    var first = model.FirstName;
    //for every supported field.
}

When I say model class I mean a POCO class. ASP.NET MVC and Web API should be able to parse the request data in to the class as appropriate.