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How do I get Web API to render a Razor view using the model that it returns? And only XML/JSON when the accept headers (or .extension) is set? Is this even possible?

It seems crazy to require one set of controllers for rendering HTML and another for JSON/XML if they're working on the same models.

Update Darrel Miller has already written a ViewEngineFormatter for Razor which might do the trick, though haven't tried it yet.

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I asked a similar question about this in the past on StackOverflow, because I wanted to do the same thing. However, I eventually ended up with an "Api" area and set of controllers, and a standard set of MVC controllers for the website.

In hindsight this actually wasn't a bad thing. I've found I tend to do different things in each set of controllers anyway. My views aren't just CRUD but tend to contain extra contextual data, so returning view models specific to that page is nice.

I think if I had stuck to my goal of combining the two I might have ended up with either over-complicated controllers or a user experience that wasn't as optimal as it could have been. So while this isn't a direct answer to your question, in my experience not being able to do this might not be such a bad thing.

Instead I've ended up with a rich set of builders and commands that most of my controllers delegate to. That way I can reuse most of the controller logic while being able to do specific things for API versus the web:

http://www.paulstovell.com/clean-aspnet-mvc-controllers

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good to know where you ended up - I'd actually already read your post on clean controllers a while back, so thank you :) In terms of contextual data, is it shared view data? If you had gone the ActionFilter route for populating that, would that have resulted in API/front-end having same view model again - or did you find there are still differences beyond that?
There were still differences, because the UI was more task focussed while the API was more CRUD focussed.
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Yes, it is how it is designed for: Web API for data and MVC for rendered views. I know that some people will try adding view engine support to web API but it is not designed for it.

My personal view on this is that this parallel world between MVC and Web API (which is the source of most criticisms while community has generally praised the product) is mainly a consequence of the fact that Web API has been added to MVC without having a reference (or knowledge of it).

As Jon Galloway said on a recent podcast, had the team have HTTP knowledge they have now (as well as hindesight of the popularity of REST API now which they did not have then), they would have designed just a single pipeline serving data and rendered view alike.

I can only speculate that the future version of MVC/Web API will be presented as a single pipeline. In fact, this parallel world might have been a careful plan to unify them in the near future.

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It seems crazy to require one set of controllers for rendering HTML and another for JSON/XML if they're working on the same models.

AFAIK, that's how it is. Standard controllers should be used for rendering HTML and ApiControllers for JSON/XML.

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@ShaneCourtrille what were they thinking calling it an ApiController then? ;) But agreed, my main frustration simply steps from the lack of connective-ness between MVC and Web API
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It seems crazy to require one set of controllers for rendering HTML and another for JSON/XML if they're working on the same models.

Web API is exactly what it is called - a technology for creating API's.

If you are creating an ASP.NET MVC application and want to return some JSON for your own purpose then you don't need content negotiation etc. therefore you don't need Web API (just use plain old good JsonResult).

If you want to create a reusable API than Web API is what you need but your client application should consume it in the same way as everybody else.

Web API isn't meant to be a "hammer" for "nailing" all non-HTML requests - use it when you need it.

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IMHO a public API isn't necessarily distinct from an MVC application - but MVC alone doesn't lend itself well to rendering different media types. It just seems a shame you can't get the best of both worlds (FubuMVC and others aside).
You should also remember that ASP.NET MVC is only a sample here, because Web API can be self hosted or a part of WebForms application. In the end nothign is stopping you from creating media type formatter that would support this scenario - it is just not the best design.
In fact someone already has - github.com/WebApiContrib/WebAPIContrib/blob/master/src/… - though would be curious why you consider this route would be not the best design? thanks
Paul has already highlighted the most common aspects. The actual views tend to have a lot of additional data - thats why ViewModel is so common pattern. The Web API is designed to be much more directly binded to the actual Model, which makes it ideal solution for underlying CRUD but not for entire presentation layer. That doesn't change the fact that better integration of pipelines for ASP.NET MVC and Web API would brought some technical advantages (still the logical separation would make sense).
WebApi should be a superset of MVC. There's no reason for an http api framework that supports content negotiation not to support text/html, it being one of the most common media types in the world wide web. It's absurd to need to have 2 seperate controllers (and 2 seperate URLs, routing, infrastructures, patterns, etc) to render JSON and html representations of the same resource
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I am looking for something similar to this, but not entirely. Through scouring the web, I found a couple posts by Fredrik Normen. He writes about this exact problem space and actually identifies a third-party solution in the second post listed. Basically, the solution involves creating a custom MediaTypeFormatter that knows how to handle views using the Razor engine provided by Microsoft (through the use of a third-party library).

Hopefully Microsoft will implement something soon in Web API as Hypermedia seems to be gaining traction.

Hope this helps!

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