MediaTypeFormatter

In context of WebAPI or RESTful Services to be precise, Media represents the piece of data you want to send to your service with your Http Request. MediaType represents the type of media you are sending to the service such as text, xml or json.

By default, WebAPI supports only xml and json type of media with HttpRequests. What if the client wants to send data in csv format? To support such types, we make use of MediaTypeFormatter class to create a Custom Formatter to handle incoming data with such unsupported formats. This is the simple example to create and use it:

CsvTypeFormatter.cs

public class CsvTypeFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter {
public CsvTypeFormatter () {
this.SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new MediaTypeHeaderValue("text/csv"));
}
//Add additional logic
}

Afterwards, register it in Global.asaxfig file:

GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add
(
new CSVMediaTypeFormatter(new QueryStringMapping("format", "csv", "text/csv"))
);

More info here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/web-api/overview/formats-and-model-binding/media-formatters

4 Replies

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Sahil Sharma8y ago
Accepted answer
In context of WebAPI or RESTful Services to be precise, Media represents the piece of data you want to send to your service with your Http Request. MediaType represents the type of media you are sending to the service such as text, xml or json.

By default, WebAPI supports only xml and json type of media with HttpRequests. What if the client wants to send data in csv format? To support such types, we make use of MediaTypeFormatter class to create a Custom Formatter to handle incoming data with such unsupported formats. This is the simple example to create and use it:

CsvTypeFormatter.cs
public class CsvTypeFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter {
public CsvTypeFormatter () {
this.SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new MediaTypeHeaderValue("text/csv"));
}
//Add additional logic
}
Afterwards, register it in Global.asaxfig file:
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.Add
(
new CSVMediaTypeFormatter(new QueryStringMapping("format", "csv", "text/csv"))
);
More info here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/web-api/overview/formats-and-model-binding/media-formatters
+1
Sanghamitra Mohanty8y ago
Thank you so much
0
Gajanan Chavhan8y ago
In context with Asp.net Web API, we need to serialize the request data and also needs to deserialize response data and media type formatters are classes responsible for serializing request/response data.
For different type of format there are different media type formatter classes:
e.g :
JsonMediaTypeFormatter : used to handle JSON format
XmlMediaTypeFormatter : used to handle XML format
+1
Faisal Pathan8y ago
Please refer this link http://www.tutorialsteacher.com/webapi/web-api-formatters
+1