The standard way AFAIK to return data in ASP.NET Core Web Api is by using IActionResult and providing e.g. an OkObject result. This works fine with objects, but what if I have obtained a JSON string somehow, and I just want to return that JSON back to the caller?
e.g.
public IActionResult GetSomeJSON()
{
return Ok("{ \"name\":\"John\", \"age\":31, \"city\":\"New York\" }");
}
What ASP.NET Core does here is, it takes the JSON String, and wraps it into JSON again (e.g. it escapes the JSON)
Returning plain text with [Produces("text/plain")] does work by providing the "RAW" content, but it also sets the content-type of the response to PLAIN instead of JSON. We use [Produces("application/json")] on our Controllers.
How can I return the JSON that I have as a normal JSON content-type without it being escaped?
Note: It doesn't matter how the JSON string was aquired, it could be from a 3rd party service, or there are some special serialization needs so that we want to do custom serialization instead of using the default JSON.NET serializer.
And of course a few minutes after posting the question I stumble upon a solution :)
Just return Content with the content type application/json...
return Content("{ \"name\":\"John\", \"age\":31, \"city\":\"New York\" }", "application/json");