A 'MediaTypeFormatter' for generating HTML markup for ASP.NET Web API applications.
Overview
Before we dive into the details, here is a simple example of using the HtmlMediaTypeViewFormatter with Razor:
public class CustomerController : ApiController
{
public Customer Get()
{
return new Customer { Name = "John Doe", Country = "Country" };
}
}
This controller will simply return a Customer as JSON or XAML based on the "Accept" or "content-type" header.
By adding the HtmlMediaTypeViewFormatter to the global.asax and using the RazorViewLocator and a RazorViewParser the code can also render the model as HTML by using a Razor view. By default the view will be located by convention, using the name of the returned model in this case "Customer.cshtml" or "Customer.vbhtml".
protected void Application_Start()
{
//...
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add(new HtmlMediaTypeViewFormatter());
GlobalViews.DefaultViewParser = new RazorViewParser();
GlobalViews.DefaultViewLocator = new RazorViewLocator();
//...
}
The GlobalViews and HtmlMediaTypeViewFormatter comes from the WebApiContrib.Formatting.Html project.
Views should be added to the web api projects "~/Views" folder. Here is an example of a View:
<html>Hello @Model.Name! Welcome to Razor!</html>
2 Install packages
Get it from NuGet:
Install-Package WebApiContrib.Formatting.Razor
3 How the View locator works
The razor view locator RazorViewLocator vill try to locate a view by using either, convention, annotation, configuration or by returning a View. The views must be located in the follwoing folders:
~\Views
~\Views\Shared
The "~" is the root folder of the web application. Both .cshtml and .vbhtml are supported.
Note: There is no way to specify another paths at this moment, it's easy to implement a view locator. It's done by implementing the IViewLocator interface located in the WebApiContrib.Formatting.Html assembly.
3.1 Using convention
By default the RazorViewLocator will locate a view by convention, it will try to find a view by the name of the model returned by the ApiController's methods. The following code will try to find a view with the name "Customer" in the "Views" or "Views\Shared" folder and use it to render the returnd
Customer model:
public class CustomerController : ApiController
{
public Customer Get()
{
return new Customer { Name = "John Doe", Country = "Country" };
}
}
To use the ApiController to render the Customer model with the Customer view, just use the following path in browser:
http://localhost/mysite/customer
3.2 Using annotation
A view could be specified for a specific mode by adding the ViewAttribute to the model returned by a ApiController method.
public class CustomerController : ApiController
{
public Customer Get()
{
return new Customer { Name = "John Doe", Country = "Country" };
}
}
[View("CustomerViaAttrib")]
public class Customer
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Country { get; set; }
}
This code will try to locate a view with the name "CustomerViaAttrib".