Question

I would like to render a image by using the webapi so that i can include e-tag or many other things for the caching purposes. and may be render different size of images based on the device.

I have written a formatter which accepts “image/jpeg” which rendering correct;y with the fiddler . But incase of browser tag sends the accept header as “star/star” which is just a media range . is there anyway that a header can be sent or any other way to render a image with the web api

Answer 1

When evaluating accept header values we rank them based on how specific they are. That is,

Accept: image/jpeg

ranks higher than

Accept: image/*

which ranks higher than

Accept: */*

What happens is that if you have multiple formatters for a controller and you just get a / accept header then we pick the first formatter in the list that can serialize a particular body type.

The simplest way to fix this is to remove the other formatters in the HttpConfiguration simply by clearing the list before you add your own formatter.

You can also do it on a per controller basis using per controller style configuration, see [1] for more details on this scenario in partcular.

Henrik

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmstall/archive/2012/05/11/per-controller-configuration-in-webapi.aspx