DarksideCookie

A while back, I was contacted by the people at Webucator in regards to one of my blog posts. In particular this one… They wanted to know if they could make a video version of it, and of course I said yes! And here it is! Hot off the presses!

So there it is! And they even managed to get my last name more or less correct, which is awesome! So if you are looking for some on-line ASP.NET Training, have a look at their website.

I have once again been tasked with writing a ASP.NET Wep Api action to handle the upload of a file. Or rather a form including a file. And once again, I Googled it looking for good solutions. And once again I got the same code thrown in my face over and over again. It seems to be the only one out there. And it isn’t what I want…

The code I am talking about is the one available at http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/advanced/sending-html-form-data,-part-2. And if you don’t want to go and read that, the general gist is this

if (!Request.Content.IsMimeMultipartContent())
    throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.UnsupportedMediaType);
 
string root = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data");
var provider = new MultipartFormDataStreamProvider(root);
 
await Request.Content.ReadAsMultipartAsync(provider);
 
/* Get files using provider.FileData */

More...

Ok, so this post sprung out of an idea that I have had in my head for a while. I know it will probably be solved better in ASP.NET v.Next, and can probably be solved in a bunch of other ways using only Web API or only MVC, but I wanted to see if I could use both to do it…

So what is IT? Well… In Web API, we have the ability to use content negotiation out of the box. Unfortunately, that content negotiation is, at least by default, based around serializing to XML or JSON. It doesn’t include all the view goodness that MVC has. There is no simple way to ask Web API to return a Razor view… So if I want to have content negotiation to handle both serialized data and views, we need to do some work…

On top of that, my solution would work nicely together with an existing MVC application, making it “easy” to add API features and content negotiation to the existing MVC URLs.

More...