MVC5 - WebAPI 2 - CamelCase JSON formatter stopped working when Controller changed to return HttpResponseMessage

Question

In our Web API 2 application, we configured the JSON formatting globally like this:

var jsonformatter = GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter;      
jsonformatter.SerializerSettings.ContractResolver = new CamelCasePropertyNamesContractResolver();

This worked great - JSON was camelcase.., until we changed our controller methods to return a HttpReponseMessage (instead of the response model type directly) like this:

Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, response);

That one change seemed to cause MVC to not use the JSON formatter. Our JSON is no longer CaemlCase.

Is this the expected/designed behavior or have I not specified the formatter correctly?

Thanks, -Mike

Answer 1

Actual method that is called when you use Request.CreateResponse is this:

public static HttpResponseMessage CreateResponse<T>(
                                          this HttpRequestMessage request, T value)
{
    return request.CreateResponse<T>(HttpStatusCode.OK, value, configuration: null);
}

As you see configuration property is just being set to null.

So you can just manually take configuration from Request object and call another overload like this:

Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, response, Request.GetConfiguration());

If you are interested in more detail, you can check source code of the framework. CreateResponse is defined here