Adding "charset" to all ASP.NET MVC HTTP responses

Question

Is there an easy way to specify all "normal" views is an ASP.NET MVC app are to have charset=utf-8 appended to the Content-Type? View() lacks an override that allows you to specify the Content-Type, and ActionResult and friends don't seem to expose anything, either. The motivation is obviously to work around Internet Explorer guessing the "correct" encoding type, which I in turn want to do to avoid UTF-7 XSS attacks.

Answer 1

You could write an attribute for it:

public class CharsetAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Headers["Content-Type"] += ";charset=utf-8";
    }
}

Feel free to make it a bit smarter, but that's the general idea. Add it to your base controller class and your whole app is covered.

Answer 2

Maybe this in your web.config will do the magic?

<globalization requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8" />