This is going to be easy. As many of the other posts of this blog, even this entry is due to an issue I was forced to face, this time with the marvelous IE8 😀
In a nutshell, I have a WebAPI project returning some nice json data. Everything works fine, except when you try to access the api via Ajax + IE8…the browser is somehow refusing to perform the ajax call due to the fact that the content type “application/json” in the response header is not recognised. Damn.

What I had to do is adding a custom MediaTypeFormatter that returns the json data using “text/plain”, and then on client side parse the resulting string using some library like this one.

Here’s the code of the formatter:

[csharp]
public class PlainTextMediaTypeFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter
{
const string supportedMediaType = “text/plain”;

public PlainTextMediaTypeFormatter()
{
this.AddQueryStringMapping(“format”, “plain”, new MediaTypeHeaderValue(supportedMediaType));
}

public override void SetDefaultContentHeaders(Type type, HttpContentHeaders headers, MediaTypeHeaderValue mediaType)
{
base.SetDefaultContentHeaders(type, headers, mediaType);
}

public override bool CanReadType(Type type)
{
return false;
}

public override bool CanWriteType(Type type)
{
return true;
}

public override Task WriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, Stream writeStream, HttpContent content, TransportContext transportContext)
{
using (var writer = new StreamWriter(writeStream))
{
var jsonData = string.Empty;
if (null != value)
jsonData = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(value);

writer.WriteLine(jsonData);
}

var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource

The code is pretty easy, we can split it into 2 main parts:
1) use MediaTypeFormatterExtensions.AddQueryStringMapping to register custom querystring parameter, telling the WebAPI engine to use this media formatter (for example: http://mywebapi.com/products?format=plain)
2) in the WriteToStreamAsync method just serialize the input value to json and write it to the output stream as string (I am using the terrific Newtonsoft Json library for this)

BONUS:
if you don’t like adding more querystring parameters,  the MediaTypeFormatterExtensions class exposes other two methods, AddRequestHeaderMapping and AddUriPathExtensionMapping.

Enjoy!

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