Creating custom ActionResult

It is possible to inherit the ActionResult class and create a custom ActionResult.
The following class creates a new kind of ActionResult for spewing out the serialized string of an inputted data contract instance.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;

namespace TestActionMethodSelectorAttribute.ActionResult
{

    public class DataContractSerializedResult : System.Web.Mvc.ActionResult
    {

        private object data;

        public DataContractSerializedResult(object data)
        {
            this.data = data;
        }

        public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)
        {
            var response = context.HttpContext.Response;
            response.ContentType = "text/xml";
            DataContractSerializer serializer = new   DataContractSerializer(data.GetType());
            serializer.WriteObject(response.OutputStream, data); 
        }
    }

}

You will need to add a reference to the System.Runtime.Serialization assembly and namespace. We use DataContractSerializer to serialize the object to a string value. The stream in use is the context.HttpContext.Response.OutputStream, where context is the ControllerContext (current).

It is required to set the ContentType to "text/xml" to output xml.

Usage, adding a test method to homecontroller (ignore Hungarian notation, this is for demonstration purposes..) :

   public DataContractSerializedResult About2()
        {
            return new DataContractSerializedResult(
                new AgeNameDataContract
                {
                     Age = 93,
                     Name = "Gamla Olga"
                });
        }

Then we get the xml outputted of the data contract passed in:



The morale of the story, to create a new kind of ActionResult:

- inherit from ActionResult
- implement abstract method ExecuteResult