How do I implement a MongoDB Bson formatter in Web API 2?

debugcn Published at Dev

Adrian Rosca

I have a Web API 2 project and my WebApiConfig looks like this:

public static class WebApiConfig
{
    public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
    {
        config
            .MapHttpAttributeRoutes();


        config
            .Formatters
            .JsonFormatter
            .SupportedMediaTypes
            .Add(new MediaTypeHeaderValue("text/html"));
    }
}

This works fine, but I want the json to be parsed 'Mongo DB style' so automatically get serialization of ObjectIDs, so I can use attributes like [BsonElement("name")] on properties in my model classes and so on.

I looked around and found this article http://odetocode.com/blogs/scott/archive/2013/09/30/custom-serialization-with-json-net-webapi-and-bsondocument.aspx but it seems a bit outdated and I cannot get it to work.

I'm pretty stuck for the moment, help much appreciated.

JotaBe

You need to implement and register a custom media formatter. Basically, you need to do this:

derive a class from MediaTypeFormatter (asynchronous read/write implementation) or BufferedMediaTypeFormatter (synchronous read/write implemetation)
- declare the supported MIME type for BSON format in the class constructor
- implement CanWriteType + WriteToStream and/or CanreadType + ReadFromStream
register the media formatter class in Web API configuration

Take into account that the formatter will be used:

to parse the received data, when the media format is specified in Content-Type header (this is the Read part of your implementation)
to serialize the returned object when the media format is specified with Accept header (this is the write part of your implementation)

You can have a look at these samples, or google for "Web API custom media formatters" to get more info and samples:

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