Question

So, it pretty much is all in the title. Basically, I want to send a JSON through JQuery from client to asp.net MVC. I’m wondering if it’s possible for it to receive (but not necessarily parse) any JSON I want to send from JQuery Ajax call, regardless of it’s type.. without me having a concrete type/model representation of it. (basically like a dynamic type?)

Doing this the regular way (with me declaring the passing argument as type Object) just brings about nulls, which was what I expected.

Basically, I want to do some kind of “reflection for JSON” type stuff when I receive it, and be able to get it’s properties through some kind of foreach loop and etc.

Thanks in advance. Any help would be great!

Answer 1

You could use an IDictionary<string, object> as action argument. Just write a custom model binder that will parse a JSON request into it:

public class DictionaryModelBinder : IModelBinder
{
    public object BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
    {
        if (!controllerContext.HttpContext.Request.ContentType.StartsWith("application/json", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
        {
            return null;
        }

        controllerContext.HttpContext.Request.InputStream.Position = 0;
        using (var reader = new StreamReader(controllerContext.HttpContext.Request.InputStream))
        {
            var json = reader.ReadToEnd();
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(json))
            {
                return null;
            }
            return new JavaScriptSerializer().DeserializeObject(json);
        }
    }
}

which will be registered in Application_Start:

ModelBinders.Binders.Add(typeof(IDictionary<string, object>), new DictionaryModelBinder());

then you could have the following controller action:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Foo(IDictionary<string, object> model)
{
    return Json(model);
}

to which you can throw anything:

var model = {
    foo: {
        bar: [ 1, 2, 3 ],
        baz: 'some baz value'
    }
};

$.ajax({
    url: '@Url.Action("foo")',
    type: 'POST',
    contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
    data: JSON.stringify(model),
    success: function (result) {
        // TODO: process the results from the server
    }
});