Protect my code from Newtonsoft JSON

Question

I am building a textbook .NET WebAPI web service, which is supposed in the most simplistic case receive a GET request and return a JSON array of objects.

But the project also loads NewtonsoftJSON nuget package, and apparently that package re-defines the ApiController class, so that its Json() method has a different declaration. The end result is that I get the following compile time error:

How can I protect the declaration of my controller from being re-defined by Newtonsoft?

public class ImmediateInformationController : ApiController
{
    public JsonResult Get([FromUri] ImmediateInformation ii)
    {
        // some code here
        return this.Json(iil, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
    }
}

A bit of a background: initially I was returning just iil , but when testing in the browser, it prompted to download ImmediateInformation.json file, which contained the JSON I needed. The above was an attempt to have the JSON returned as plain text, and that lead me to the discovery that Newtonsoft re-defined ApiController when parameter types did not match MSDN documentation.

Just to re-cap: the question is only using JSON download issue to illustrate what I was doing. How can I ensure that when I am declaring the controller class to be a descendant of ApiController , it is Microsoft's API controller, and not Newtonsoft's?

Answer 1

Web API 2 includes JSON.NET by default, and uses that in its Json() method . Your tutorial probably doesn't target Web API 2, but an earlier version, or MVC instead of Web API .

Either omit the JsonRequestBehavior:

return this.Json(iil);

Or simply return the proper return type and let Web API handle the serialization:

public ImmediateInformation Get([FromUri] ImmediateInformation ii)
{
    return ii;
}

Which you could also do using an IHttpActionResult:

public IHttpActionResult Get([FromUri] ImmediateInformation ii)
{
    return this.Ok(ii);
}

According to your edit and comment, you're actually looking for How can I convince IE to simply display application/json rather than offer to download it? .

Answer 2

You'll need to fully qualify the parameter.

return this.Json(iil, System.Web.Mvc.JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);

Or you can use an alias .

using NJson = Newtonsoft.Json;