>From my limited reading on this I think you will struggle to remove the
xmlns, the rationale being that without a namespace the xml is not valid.
While technically true, it is also annoying.
Personally I have a strong preference for JSON these days and use it
whenever I can... simple, ubiquitous and hardly any rules to conform to.
YMMV.
Cheers
Dave
Sent from my flux capacitor. Please excuse brevity and any odd autocorrect
errors.
On 20/01/2014 3:03 PM, "Greg Keogh" <g...@mira.net> wrote:
> I can confirm that WebAPI does as you say and it looks for a formatter
> that matches the Accept header ... To make things easier and consistent for
> everyone I have abandoned the idea of returning plain text in some methods,
> I will always return an XML serialised class no matter how small the data
> might be. This is easier to document and the client will probably
> appreciate it. So the confusion about choosing text or xml will go away.
> I'll leave my text formatter there as a stub just in case someone wants csv
> formatting or similar later.
>
> I notice that if my controller method returns "string" then the xml
> formatter sends back <String>hello</String> and Accept text/plain returns
> "hello", which makes sense. If I try to get a class back as text it ignores
> me and I get XML anyway, which also makes sense.
>
> My task now is to remove the xmlns="" clutter from the xml root.
>
> Part of my learners confusion is the large numbers of return types that
> are possible from controller methods, some not even in the same class
> hierarchy.
>
> Greg K
>
>
>
> On 20 January 2014 14:31, David Burstin <david.burs...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Greg, let the web API deal with the formatting. Your controller should
>> ideally just return an object which will be formatted according to the
>> request.
>>
>> (apologies for brevity, I am playing mini golf with my son)
>>
>> Try it in Fiddler and you can see how changing the request will change
>> the output. If you hard code the response type you are introducing
>> unnecessary coupling snd potential future headaches.
>>
>> Sent from my flux capacitor. Please excuse brevity and any odd
>> autocorrect errors.
>> On 20/01/2014 1:54 PM, "Greg Keogh" <g...@mira.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Please ignore previous message as I hit Send instead of Save (bloody
>>> Gmail interface!). Here's the correct message:
>>>
>>> Chaps, after some doodling around I see I can get the Accept values
>>> straight out of the Request in the controller's code. That does now seem to
>>> be the logical way of choosing the response format.
>>>
>>> More confusion though ... I tried to write a controller method that
>>> returned either plain text or XML, but the samples I've found return
>>> different types. Here are the two samples:
>>>
>>> public HttpActionResult Sample1()
>>> return Ok("hello");
>>>
>>> public HttpResponseMessage Sample2()
>>> return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("hello")
>>> };
>>>
>>> The firsts returns <String>hello</String> and the second returns the
>>> plain text "hello". But they're different return types and I can't figure
>>> out how get one method to return Xml or text. Anyone know how. I'm still
>>> searching.
>>>
>>> Greg K
>>>
>>
>
