MVC: How to Return a String as JSON

Question

In an effort to make a progress reporting process a little more reliable and decouple it from the request/response, I am performing the processing in a Windows Service and persisting the intended response to a file. When the client starts polling for updates, the intention is that the controller returns the contents of the file, whatever they are, as a JSON string.

The contents of the file are pre-serialized to JSON. This is to ensure that there is nothing standing in the way of the response. No processing needs to happen (short of reading the file contents into a string and returning it) to get the response.

I initially though this would be fairly simple, but it is not turning out to be the case.

Currently my controller method looks thusly:

Controller

Updated

[HttpPost]
public JsonResult UpdateBatchSearchMembers()
{
    string path = Properties.Settings.Default.ResponsePath;
    string returntext;
    if (!System.IO.File.Exists(path))
        returntext = Properties.Settings.Default.EmptyBatchSearchUpdate;
    else
        returntext = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(path);

    return this.Json(returntext);
}

And Fiddler is returning this as the raw response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: ASP.NET Development Server/10.0.0.0
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:30:05 GMT
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-AspNetMvc-Version: 3.0
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 81
Connection: Close

"{\"StopPolling\":false,\"BatchSearchProgressReports\":[],\"MemberStatuses\":[]}"

AJAX

Updated

The following will likely be changed later, but for now this was working when I was generating the response class and returning it as JSON like a normal person.

this.CheckForUpdate = function () {
var parent = this;

if (this.BatchSearchId != null && WorkflowState.SelectedSearchList != "") {
    showAjaxLoader = false;
    if (progressPending != true) {
        progressPending = true;
        $.ajax({
            url: WorkflowState.UpdateBatchLink + "?SearchListID=" + WorkflowState.SelectedSearchList,
            type: 'POST',
            contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
            cache: false,
            success: function (data) {
                for (var i = 0; i < data.MemberStatuses.length; i++) {
                    var response = data.MemberStatuses[i];
                    parent.UpdateCellStatus(response);
                }
                if (data.StopPolling = true) {
                    parent.StopPullingForUpdates();
                }
                showAjaxLoader = true;
            }
        });
        progressPending = false;
    }
}

Answer 1

The issue, I believe, is that the Json action result is intended to take an object (your model) and create an HTTP response with content as the JSON-formatted data from your model object.

What you are passing to the controller's Json method, though, is a JSON-formatted string object, so it is "serializing" the string object to JSON, which is why the content of the HTTP response is surrounded by double-quotes (I'm assuming that is the problem).

I think you can look into using the Content action result as an alternative to the Json action result, since you essentially already have the raw content for the HTTP response available.

return this.Content(returntext, "application/json");
// not sure off-hand if you should also specify "charset=utf-8" here, 
//  or if that is done automatically

Another alternative would be to deserialize the JSON result from the service into an object and then pass that object to the controller's Json method, but the disadvantage there is that you would be de-serializing and then re-serializing the data, which may be unnecessary for your purposes.

Answer 2

You just need to return standard ContentResult and set ContentType to "application/json". You can create custom ActionResult for it:

public class JsonStringResult : ContentResult
{
    public JsonStringResult(string json)
    {
        Content = json;
        ContentType = "application/json";
    }
}

And then return it's instance:

[HttpPost]
public JsonResult UpdateBatchSearchMembers()
{
    string returntext;
    if (!System.IO.File.Exists(path))
        returntext = Properties.Settings.Default.EmptyBatchSearchUpdate;
    else
        returntext = Properties.Settings.Default.ResponsePath;

    return new JsonStringResult(returntext);
}

Answer 3

Yeah that's it without no further issues, to avoid raw string json this is it.

    public ActionResult GetJson()
    {
        var json = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(
            Server.MapPath(@"~/App_Data/content.json"));

        return new ContentResult
        {
            Content = json,
            ContentType = "application/json",
            ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8
        };
    } 

NOTE: please note that method return type of JsonResult is not working for me, since JsonResult and ContentResult both inherit ActionResult but there is no relationship between them.