I am quite familiar with ASP.NET MVC and know that a controller’s method can respond with XML and JSON apart from other things (i.e. behave like a restful webservice). I am just wondering whether I can make a controller method behave like a soap web service which responds with a SOAP XML response to a POST request? Maybe it is just question of responding with XML but this would be more like a restful web service. I want to avoid having to implement a separate web service project if possible. Any feedback would be very much appreciated. Thanks.
Christian
You don't need to implement a separate web service project. All you need is to add a WCF service endpoint (.svc file) to your current web project. Also you are saying that you expect SOAP response after a GET request which of course doesn't make much sense because in the SOAP specification requests should be POST.
I believe your thought is to create a single deployable MVC Web Application that can respond to both SOAP requests and RESTful requests (maybe even more?). I have thought about this myself, however there is no point in re-inventing WCF as it can do both without any additional programming. The ASP.Net MVC assemblies were not designed to function as a web service, and although it can, probably shouldn't be when other technologies exist that were designed specifically for that purpose.
Related
It's more a structural question than a technical one.
I made a classical Web App with ASP.NET MVC.
I works well, the server responds with HTML when I send him an URL. Ok.
I now want to make a mobile application (Android) to access the same data.
Maybe there is a way to use the controller's methods which already return the objects I'll need.
So the question:
Is there a simple way to make a REST API from a ASP.NET MVC WebAPP?
Once again, I think that the controller's method will be pretty much the same. It just has to not return HTML but XML for instance.
I'm a newbie in the Web services technologies.
Add webapi project to your solution
Configure web api controllers
Reuse MVVC classes to access database
Return necessary data - webapi will return it in json and in xml (depends how client will consume it)
Since REST services do not require XML, but we can use it with XML so can I call it a XML web service?
I'm doing my home work with the requirement that:
Using ASP.NET MVC
Provide an XML Web service
I was thinking about SOAP, but REST is more simple for me and I found alot of tut for REST with ASP.NET MVC rather than SOAP (They now all telling me about WCF...)
If REST is not an XML web service, please show some basic document about SOAP (or any thing else that call XML web service) with ASP.NET MVC!
Take a look at WCF Web Api. REST does not imply any particular format. A good REST service will allow you to set the Accept Header: json, xml, so on. E.g.: "accept" : "application/json"
Here is a good post on how to achieve this with WCF Web Api.
You can simply add a Web Service into your MVC application. You must take care about exclude "*.asmx" from your routes.
I.E:
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.asmx/{*pathInfo}");
I'm developing an ASP.NET MVC 3 application. I need this application to make use of an API I also need to implement. The API should both be available from ASP.NET MVC controller actions and Ajax. Now it is quite easy to make an API using ASP.NET MVC, but is it possible to use this from other ASP.NET MVC website actions? I guess the WCF is quite easy to use as it is just a service reference.
Other users of the API could be Windows Phone and iPhone.
Update:
Many only sees the API as a place where you consume data, but what about the part where you want to execute commands or do stuff, like add customer or change foo?
You may want to check our new WCF web API that was announced at PDC. We recently released a big upgrade. WCF Web API is designed specifically for allowing you to expose APIs to a range of clients in a pure HTTP manner. It is lightweight, offers a nice configuration story (no configuration files) and also is much easier to test.
You can download the bits at wcf.codeplex.com. It includes various samples, and there is also a set of NuGet packs for getting you started. Search for webapi.all on NuGet.
The way I like to do this is with RESTful controller actions. You can return JSON and use your calls with JavaScript on your own site. Other websites would almost certainly understand JSON and so they'd be able to consume your API pretty easily. This is much easier to write and test than a heavy WCF layer.
Check out this question for some example REST frameworks for MVC:
ASP.NET MVC REST frameworks
One of the newer ways of accomplishing data feeds is using OData. Scott Hanselman has a great introduction to it in Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes.
It allows you to even throw LINQ queries into your URLs to retrieve exactly the data you need.
Open Data Protocol (Official site)
Open Data Protocol (MSDN, Microsoft)
WCF JSON binding was really terrible last time I used it. WCF also comes with all sorts of crazy rules about streams and how you have to use [MessageBody] attributes for everything.
It was a real PITA to me.
I knew I've answered something like this before:
What is the best way to implement a RESTful architecture in .NET today?
A 3rd party site sends its notifications after my web application has completed some action in order to notify me of its success. Receiving a notification item requires a response back to the 3rd party server (URL) with the a containing the value "accepted".
I have never user SOAP and with the basic info found I'm a bit lost for the case of asp.net mvc. Are there any good links showing the principle of receiving and sending SOAP responses?
Tutorials / information may be presented in other languages such as java, asp.net (classic) or something. I need to get a general idea since googling on SOAP has not given me anything for the past few hours.
You need to learn a little about WCF. See the WCF Developer Center, especially the Beginners Guide.
What you want is to create a simple WCF service that corresponds to the WSDL that they will give you. You will need to implement only the operation (method) that they will call to notify you. You can host a WCF service in IIS along with the rest of your application.
The issue will be how to correlate the notifications with the page you're on in your MVC application.
I don't think this is specific to ASP.NET MVC really. If you have a WSDL for their web service, just use that to generate stub classes using either wsdl.exe or by adding a web reference to your project, then call the web service from your controller.
If I remember correctly SOAP is basically xml requests and responses.
You might want to look into WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) to avoid having to deal with raw data, and you would likely find a great deal of tutorials on wsdl as well.
I want to expose a service on my site that any users can call and get a JSON response. In the end, I want the users to be using this service as much as possible.
My site is created using the asp.net MVC framework and i was wondering whats the best way to do this...
I think most would say it's obvious to use a web service (*.asmx) that returns JSON format, but i know that I can just create a url that users can call and have it return JSON format as well (e.g: calling "http://mysite.com/GetList" would return JSON list). In asp.net, using the return Json() method.
What are the advantages/disadvantages doing it this way vs. a Web Service which is specifically intended for this ?
I don't know that most would say use a .asmx web service. Personally I haven't made a .asmx web service in a while and I would go for the MVC approach. The only things I'd be worried about would be:
future changes to the data, url, and/or parameters passed in.
Making the controller too big or cluttered, in which case you could create a separate API controller.
To me the advantages are that it's more consistent with the rest of your app, it's simple and easy to work with, and there's not much to configure.
A web service would expose a WSDL.