Question

I am trying to use jQuery .load() to get straight html from a asmx web service:

$(‘#target’).load(‘MyService.asmx/GetHtml’);

In .NET code, GetHtml() returns as string:

    [WebMethod(EnableSession = false)]
    [ScriptMethod(UseHttpGet = true, ResponseFormat = ResponseFormat.Xml)]
    public string GetHtml()
    {
        return "<span>Hi</span>";
    }

That returns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<string xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">&lt;span&gt;Hi&lt;/span&gt;</string>

Notice that the string is encoded. With that encoding, $.load doesn’t work right. The displayed text actually has the tags shown.

How can I get the WebMethod call to return just this?

<span>Hi</span>

Answer 1

I’m pretty sure that if you want straight HTML back from a service, you would need to use a handler (.ashx) rather than .asmx. I don’t know of a way to get .asmx not to encode your data in some format (though you can change what that format is).

That said, @Randolpho also has a good point.