Question

I am pretty new to Win8 and ASP.net development, I apologize for any lack of clarity or specification as I am a 3D graphics programmer by trade and taking on developing an ASP.net back end system. The goal is communicate with a target Win8 app to consume data that is input via the ASP.net website by a user(admin).

I am hitting multiple hurdles and dead ends with it being new Win8 technologies and few sound reference materials.

Within HomeController.cs I am attempting to call:

 public ActionResult Admin()
    {

        string apiUri = Url.HttpRouteUrl("DefaultApi", new { controller = "testModel", });
        ViewBag.ApiUrl = new Uri(Request.Url, apiUri).AbsoluteUri.ToString();

        return View();
    }

So that I can enable routing to my Admin controller. However I get the following output in the browser:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/3JCq4.png

I am using an example project I downloaded from the internet as a skeleton framework as it contains the WebApiConfig.cs file, whereas generating a new VS2012 ASP.NET MVC Web Application project does not contain this file and I believe I need it as it is the point I am able to specify that I want to serialize as JSON and remove XML formatting.

I have cleaned out .DLL files in bin and cleaned the obj folder in case it was referencing an object that no longer exists.

There are several other projects that I have created, one that uses the VS2012 MVC Web app project generated from the wizard, it implements:

 Url.RouteUrl

instead of

 Url.HttpRouteUrl

But I am sure this does not achieve the same effect, as I want to communicate http over the internet from a server to the target app. If I try to use latter, it errors:

   'System.Web.Mvc.UrlHelper' does not contain a definition for 'HttpRouteUrl' and no extension method 'HttpRouteUrl' accepting a first argument of type 'System.Web.Mvc.UrlHelper' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

As reference, this is the article I am using to assist this portion of the project:

http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/creating-web-apis/using-web-api-with-entity-framework/using-web-api-with-entity-framework,-part-4

I appreciate the help(this is very different from OpenGl and DirectX)

Answer 1

Since this is a standard MVC controller action, not an ApiController action, the Url property inside this controller is just the standard UrlHelper.

You could use the following:

public ActionResult Admin()
{
    string apiUri = Url.RouteUrl(
        "DefaultApi", 
        new { httproute = "", controller = "Values" }, 
        Request.Url.Scheme
    );
    ViewBag.ApiUrl = apiUri;
    return View();
}

Notice the httproute = "" that is used in the routeValues parameter as well as how specifying the protocol argument generates an absolute url so that you don’t need to tweak with by creating new Uri objects and stuff..