Question

I am working on deserializing data passed to a Microsoft Web API in MVC4 RC into objects of the following class:

public class EditorCreateEditSubmission
{
    public string action { get; set; }
    public string table { get; set; }
    public string id { get; set; }
    public Dictionary<string, string> data { get; set; }
}

Whenever a Web API method gets data which should map to the EditorCreateEditSubmission, the “data” field is empty, like so:

(It’s okay for Table and ID to be empty)

My controller method:

public EditorServerResponse Post(EditorCreateEditSubmission ajaxSubmission)
{
//...Handle data
}

The raw header:

POST http://localhost:64619/API/Species HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
Referer: http://localhost:64619/Manage/Species
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)
Host: localhost:64619
Content-Length: 134
Connection: Keep-Alive
Pragma: no-cache

action=create&table=&id=&data%5Bamu%5D=1&data%5BchemicalFormula%5D=H&data%5BcommonName%5D=Hydrogen&data%5Bstatus%5D=N&data%5Bnotes%5D=

More readable view:

action  create
table   
id  
data[amu]   1
data[chemicalFormula]   H
data[commonName]    Hydrogen
data[status]    N
data[notes] 

Do I need to manually create a class with get/set values every possible set of incoming values? It seems like deserialization of this data into a Dictionary should be straightforward, but I’m having some difficulty finding examples inthe new RC release of Microsoft’s MVC4.

Answer 1

I don’t think that the FormUrlEncodedMediaTypeFormatter does handle this.