How do I return raw html from a WCF WebAPI WebGet

Question

I have a self-hosted WCF service running as a windows service using the WebAPI to handle the REST stuff and it works great.

I realise that I should really use IIS or similar to dish out actual web pages, but is there ANY way to get a service call to return "just" html?

Even if I specify "BodyStye Bare", I still get the XML wrapper around the actual HTML, ie

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<string> html page contents .... </string>


[WebGet(UriTemplate = "/start", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare)]
public string StartPage()
{
    return System.IO.File.ReadAllText(@"c:\whatever\somefile.htm");
}

Is there any way to do this or should I give up?

Answer 1

The bodystyle attribute has no effect on WCF Web API. The example below will work. It's not necessarily the best way of doing it, but it should work assuming I didn't make any typos :-).

[WebGet(UriTemplate = "/start")] 
public HttpResponseMessage StartPage() {
    var response = new HttpResponseMessage();
    response.Content = new StringContent(System.IO.File.ReadAllText(@"c:\whatever\somefile.htm"));
    response.Content.Headers.ContentType = new MediaTypeHeaderValue("text/html");
    return response; 
}

It would probably make more sense to read the file as a stream and use StreamContent instead of StringContent. Or it is easy enough to make your own FileContent class that accepts the filename as a parameter.

And, the self-host option is just as viable way to return static HTML as using IIS. Under the covers they use the same HTTP.sys kernel mode driver to deliver the bits.

Answer 2

You'll have to use a formatter that accepts "text/html" as content type and request the content type "text/html" in your request header.

If you don't add a formatter that handles the text/html, Web API falls back to the XML-formatter as default.

In your case the formatter doesn't need to format anything but just return your return value as you're returning formatted html already.