Is it possible to pass an XDocument as a parameter to an action in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

I am wondering if it is possible to write a controller action in ASP.NET MVC that takes as a parameter an XDocument. This would of course just mean that the form post would send a string of XML.

Is there anything special that I would need to do to accept this as a parameter?

Answer 1

You could write a custom type binder and register it in the Application Start event handler in global.asax:

protected void Application_Start()
{
    ModelBinders.Binders.Add(typeof(XDocument), new YourXDocumentBinder());
}

The MVC pipeline would automatically call the binder when it encountered an action with a XDocument argument.

The binder implementation would look something like this:

public class YourXDocumentBinder : DefaultModelBinder
{
    public override object BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
    {
         // handle the posted data
    }
}