Can Web API convert XML into Json?

Question

I've got a legacy web service which I'd like to wrap with a new MVC Web API, question is can I get the ASP.NET Web API to convert my xml into json?

A thought that I had was to use XDocument to create a dynamic object and return that, but when I tried it with an ExpandoObject unfortunately it returned a json object with Key/Value pairs.

Answer 1

Turns out this can be done by converting an XDocument to a dynamic JsonObject like so roughly:

var doc = XDocument.Load(uri);
foreach (var node in doc.Root.Descendants()) {
   var obj = (dynamic) new JsonObject();
   foreach (var child in node.Descendants())
   {
      obj[child.Name.LocalName] = child.Value;
      yield return obj;
   } 
}

Answer 2

Using json.NET you can do it easily:

string result = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeXmlNode(xmldocument);

Download Newtonsoft.Json at http://james.newtonking.com/pages/json-net.aspx

Answer 3

You could. One way to do it would be to deserialize the XML into objects and then serialize them again into JSON.

A more efficient (though harder to code up approach) would be to write your own xml-to-json "transcriber" that reads in the XML and spits out JSON.

Just note that not all XML can be represented easily as JSON.

Answer 4

In WebApiConfig file inside Register function add the below code at last (WebApiConfig file is at App_Start folder)

config.Formatters.JsonFormatter.SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("text/html"));