Question

I am a WCF dev, new to MVC. Trying to integrate my WCF API as ApiControllers into an MVC application (still big question if it’s a worthy effort).

I have this request from a jQuery plugin:

 POST http://localhost:18698/Api/Public/DoAction HTTP/1.1 
 ....
 Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8 Accept:
 application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01

 {"myParam":"test"}

My controller looks like this:

public class PublicController : ApiController
{
    [HttpPost]
    public string DoAction(string myParam)
    {
        return "Test";
    }
} 

And, the routing piece looks like this:

    config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
        name: "PublicApi",
        routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}"
    );

I am getting this error:

{
    "Message": "No HTTP resource was found that matches the request URI 'http://localhost:18698/Api/Public/DoAction'.",
    "MessageDetail": "No action was found on the controller 'Public' that matches the request."
}

Methods that don’t accept any JSON parameters work fine, but the ones that accept JSON parameters don’t work. I have to be able to pass complex JSON to the methods. In WCF, translation from JSON to objects was handled for me by WCF.

Do you know why I am getting this error? Would I be able to pass/receive complex JSON as seamlessly in MVC as I did in WCF?

Answer 1

If you examine the JSON you were sending {"myParam":"test"} then you will see what Darin points out i.e. you need a Model to contain your property e.g. run {“myParam”:”test”} into the following tool: http://json2csharp.com/ and you get:

public class RootObject
{
    public string myParam { get; set; }
}

Your previous method signature with the simple type of string would have been treated by WebApi as a UrlParameter by default (the same as public string DoAction([FromUri]string myFoo)). You can prove this as leaving you code as is this url should work:

http://localhost:50381/Api/Public/DoAction?myParam=something

The body serialiser using JSON.NET won’t be able to parse a simple .NET type on it’s own and therefore you need to create a simple Model to host it on. This will then use the from body binder public string DoAction([FromBody]RootObject myFoo)