Consuming a ASP.NET MVC 2 JsonResult like a web service in a web forms C# application?

Question

A friend wants to consume my ASP.NET MVC 2 application in a similar fashion as adding a web reference to it, accessing my functions, and using my model objects from a .Net web form from a separate website.

Any links out there that could explain how to "dress" my MVC responses so that his server to server consumption would be similar in experience to a web service?

I suggested using System.Net.WebClient to pull the results in to a variable then deserialize the JSON result, but maybe there's a better approach out there?

Answer 1

I'd suggest that you consider an API controller or a separate API application depending on the load you expect from people consuming data from your application. A separate API application will allow you to move it off your application servers if needed.

Rarely, will you find that the data that you would provide via an API is a one-to-one match with what your views need to be rendered. Behind the scenes you could abstract the data generation so that your API and your application controllers reuse the same code to get at the data, but the front-end of the API would understand how to negotiate security (from an API perspective) and present data that is easily consumed by a program. Moreover, you won't find that you're creating extra controllers and methods in your application just to provide some data that will never be used in a particular view.

You could use MVC or WCF for the API and JSON or XML as the payload format. If you use WCF, you get the benefit that he really can simply add a service reference to connect to it without you having to build a WSDL file/action.

Answer 2

From another's advice, Phil Haack added this to MVC 2 Futures. Add the DLL reference to the Application Start, and bingo. It uses a validator.