ASP.NEt MVC using Web API to return a Razor view

Question

How to make the View returned by the controller and generated by Razor get the data from the api i want to keep the razor engine view and use the api the original mvc cont

Answer 1

Read here on how to use the Razor view engine inside your Web API controller. The interesting part is using the RazorEngine NuGet package to do the heavy lifting.

Answer 2

The basis of the link supplied by twoflower is to have your handlers create and return an instance of a custom IHttpActionResult implementation. A simplified example is shown below:

public class TestHttpActionResult : IHttpActionResult
{
    private readonly HttpRequestMessage _request;
    private readonly string _responseString;

    public TestHttpActionResult(HttpRequestMessage request, string responseString)
    {
        _request = request;
        _responseString = responseString;
    }

    public Task<HttpResponseMessage> ExecuteAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        var response = _request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.Created);
        response.Content = new StringContent(_responseString);
        response.Content.Headers.ContentType = new MediaTypeHeaderValue("text/plain");
        return Task.FromResult(response);
    }
}

Answer 3

You could send an HTTP request to your Web API controller from within the ASP.NET MVC controller:

public class ProductController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        var client = new HttpClient();
        var response = client.GetAsync("http://yourapi.com/api/products").Result;
        var products = response.Content.ReadAsAsync<IEnumerable<Product>>().Result;
        return View(products);
    }
}

Also if you can take advantage of the .NET 4.5 async/await it is strongly recommended to do so to avoid blocking calls:

public class ProductController : Controller
{
    public async Task<ActionResult> Index()
    {
        var client = new HttpClient();
        var response = await client.GetAsync("http://yourapi.com/api/products");
        var products = await response.Content.ReadAsAsync<IEnumerable<Product>>();
        return View(products);
    }
}