Showing posts with label Custom actionresult mvc datacontract. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Custom actionresult mvc datacontract. Show all posts

Thursday 29 December 2011

Creating custom ActionResult

It is possible to inherit the ActionResult class and create a custom ActionResult.
The following class creates a new kind of ActionResult for spewing out the serialized string of an inputted data contract instance.


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;

namespace TestActionMethodSelectorAttribute.ActionResult
{

public class DataContractSerializedResult : System.Web.Mvc.ActionResult
{

private object data;

public DataContractSerializedResult(object data)
{
this.data = data;
}

public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)
{
var response = context.HttpContext.Response;
response.ContentType = "text/xml";
DataContractSerializer serializer = new DataContractSerializer(data.GetType());
serializer.WriteObject(response.OutputStream, data);
}
}

}


You will need to add a reference to the System.Runtime.Serialization assembly and namespace. We use DataContractSerializer to serialize the object to a string value. The stream in use is the context.HttpContext.Response.OutputStream, where context is the ControllerContext (current).

It is required to set the ContentType to "text/xml" to output xml.

Usage, adding a test method to homecontroller (ignore Hungarian notation, this is for demonstration purposes..) :


public DataContractSerializedResult About2()
{
return new DataContractSerializedResult(
new AgeNameDataContract
{
Age = 93,
Name = "Gamla Olga"
});
}


Then we get the xml outputted of the data contract passed in:



The morale of the story, to create a new kind of ActionResult:

- inherit from ActionResult
- implement abstract method ExecuteResult