ASP.NET WebMethod Returns JSON wrapped in quotes

Question

I have an asp.net page with a WebMethod on it to pass JSON back to my javascript.

Bellow is the web method:

[WebMethod]
public static string getData         


        

Answer 1

I assume that you want to return the JSON representation of the object

 {
    firstname:"John",
    lastname:"Smith"
 }

but your method signature is returning a string. The ASP.Net framework serialisation is correctly serialising the string response. Put another way, if your function was

string response = "foo";
return response; 

You would not be surprised if the output was

{"d":{"foo"}}

It just happens that response has double quotes that need to be escaped.

You obviously just want to get at the object. You have 2 options: -

1) use eval in your javascript to turn the string into an object e.g.

function onSuccessCallback(retval) {
     var obj = eval(retval.d);
}`

2) or (and this is my prefered solution) have your method return an actual object and let the JSON serialisationof the framework do the heavy lifting for you

[WebMethod]
public static object getData(Dictionary d) {
    var response = new { firstname = "John", lastname="Smith" };
    return response;
}

You will see that this generates the response that you probably originally expected (e.g. {"d":{"firstname":"John", "lastname":"Smith"}}