What is the simplest way to return different content types based on the extension in the URL?

Question

I'd like to be able to change the extension of a url and recieve the model in a different format.

e.g. if

/products/list

returns a html page containing a list of products, then

/products/list.json

would return them in a json list.

Note: I like the simplicity of the ASP.NET MVC REST SDK, it only requires about 5 lines of code to hook it in, but the format is specified as a query string parameter i.e. /products/list?format=json which is not what I want, I could tweak this code if there are no other options, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel!

Answer 1

You should be able to just use routes in conjunction with the rest sdk

Answer 2

Instead of "list.json", you could choose "list/json" and use a route like

{controller}/{action}/{id}

Then ProductController.List would be called, with an ID parameter of "json". The .List() action then would decide whether or not to return an HTML view or JSON content.

Answer 3

I wrote a blog post that shows one possible example. It's a tiny bit complicated, but might work for your needs.

http://haacked.com/archive/2009/01/06/handling-formats-based-on-url-extension.aspx

Answer 4

If you have the flexibility to drop Apache or something similar in front of your service, you can always use mod_rewrite to rewrite an external http://products/list.json into http://products/list?format=json which your framework can render more easily.