Question

I need to take GET fields from my asp.net web app (first name and last name). It needs to send that data from frontend(asp.net web app) using JSON to MVC 3 app. MVC 3 App would communicate with database, retrieve values and should serialize them into json object and POST to the front end(ASP.NET web app). Can anyone explain with a sample code how I would accomplish this?

Answer 1

You could use the WebClient class. It allows you to send HTTP requests to any web application. As far as the JSON part is concerned you will need a JSON serializer. You could use the built-in JavaScriptSerializer class or a third party such as Json.NET.

So let’s suppose that you have the following controller action in your ASP.NET MVC 3 application that you want to invoke:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Foo(Bar bar)
{
    ...
    return Json(new 
    {
        status = "OK"
    });
}

where the Bar class contains some properties (could be simple or complex types):

public class Bar
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
}

Now you could invoke it like this from the client side:

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
    client.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.ContentType] = "application/json";
    var serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
    var json = serializer.Serialize(new 
    {
        firstName = "first",
        lastName = "last"
    });
    var resultJson = client.UploadString("http://example.com/foo", json);
    var result = serializer.Deserialize<Result>(resultJson);
}

where you would define the Result class to match the JSON structure returned by the application:

public class Result
{
    public string Status { get; set; }
}