Question

I am learning ASP.NET MVC4 Web APIs.
I would like to create a new method that would be which receives two parameters

[HttpPost] 
public string MarkAsSeen(int objectID, long userID)

I would like to consume it using jquery:

$.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: "/api/tutorial/MarkAsSeen",
        data: JSON.stringify({ objectID: _obj, profileID: _pid }),
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        dataType: "json",
        success: function (result) {
            alert(_tutorial + ' seen');
        },async: true
});

I have my route configured this way

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

But it just doesn’t work:

No HTTP resource was found that matches the request URI ‘http://local.dev.unation.com/api/tutorial/MarkAsSeen’.”,”MessageDetail”:”No action was found on the controller ‘Tutorial’ that matches the request.

IF I change the route’s template to api/{controller}/{action}/{objectID}/{profileID} and the jquery method to add this info on the url: /api/tutorial/MarkAsSeen/ + _obj + / + _pid
it works.

I would not like to perform these changes because:

• I would like to have one general route to all actions (so their parameter names/quantity shouldn’t matter)
• This url appending is just ugly, I would like to use the data attribute

Can you tell me what I am doing wrong?

tks!

Answer 1

Web.Api doesn’t really like multiple parameters. The easiest solution is to create a new type which holds your data:

public class MarkAsSeenRequest
{
    public int objectID { get; set; }

    public int profileID { get; set; }
}

And use that in your controller action:

[HttpPost] 
public string MarkAsSeen(MarkAsSeenRequest request)
{
    //...
}

It should work fine with your original route:

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

For further reading:

• How WebAPI does Parameter Binding
• WebAPI Parameter binding under the hood
• Sending HTML Form Data