How to build a WCF to ASP.net MVC (client) architecture using JSON format/endpoint as way of communication?

Question

I am leaning towards WCF as my main source of service (I may need multiple end-points in the future), and here are the things that I have been stuck at...

WCF to CLIENT: How can I make my MVC accept JSON data from WCF service and parse it into C# primitive/complex types?
CLIENT to WCF: How can I send JSON formatted data from MVC to WCF and have it parsed to C# primitive/complex types?
side question: How can I make WCF use REST as its protocol and transmit JSON format data? Do I use REST starter kit or is it built in on WCF?

Basically, this is my architecture:

WCF === (format: JSON) ===> ASP.net MVC 3 (...and back)

WCF === (format: JSON) ===> misc client (...and back)

code samples would help greatly!

Thanks in advance for the help! :)

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 10:08:26Z

1

WCF RESTful web services are going to be your friend. In order to force the web service to return JSON take a look at this related answer.

Update: If you have control over both the client and the service it may be worth looking into WCF Data Services as an alternative. Less code = more productivity (in some cases ;))

edited May 23, 2017 at 10:08

CommunityBot

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answered Dec 18, 2011 at 5:20

M.Babcock

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4 Comments

JC JC Over a year ago

i heard that Data Services doesn't support many LINQ features.. how is it in your experience?

M.Babcock Over a year ago

Data Services is strongly tied to Linq to Entities. What linq features are you concerned about being left out?

M.Babcock Over a year ago

Server side paging can be implemented using: blogs.msdn.com/b/astoriateam/archive/2010/02/02/…, or on the client side: solidcoding.blogspot.com/2007/11/paging-with-linq.html. While I haven't used the standard LINQ paging approach in the past against Data Services I don't see why it wouldn't work.

M.Babcock Over a year ago

@JanCarloViray - On second thought, you're talking about consuming a WCF Data Service from an MVC page (presumably using AJAX), so if you are looking for an OData client library for Javascript, take a look at odata.org/developers/odata-sdk. It talks about OData clients for various languages including Javascript. In that case I would probably suggest utilizing server side paging because you don't really have Linq in Javascript to help you out.

hawkke · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-18 06:16:08Z

1

A RESTful WCF service will work, like M.Babcock said, but you can just use Ajax to call your controller action; you call your controller, which in turn calls your WCF service and returns a JsonResult. Something like this...

Controller:

public JsonResult GetData() 
{
    var result = wcf.GetSomeData();
    return Json(result); 
}

View:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(function() {
        $('#mybutton').click(function() {
             $.getJSON("/Home/GetData", null, function(data) {
                 alert(data);
             });
          });
    });
</script>

Here's a link to a better tutorial.

answered Dec 18, 2011 at 6:16

hawkke

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1 Comment

JC JC Over a year ago

hmm.. seems like asp.net MVC as a 'REST service' would be better solution for this one huh.

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