Put content in HttpResponseMessage object?

Question

Several months ago, Microsoft decided to change up the HttpResponseMessage class. Before, you could simply pass a data type into the constructor, and then return the message

Answer 1

For any T object you can do:

return Request.CreateResponse<T>(HttpStatusCode.OK, Tobject);

Answer 2

You can create your own specialised content types. For example one for Json content and one for Xml content (then just assign them to the HttpResponseMessage.Content):

public class JsonContent : StringContent
{
    public JsonContent(string content)
        : this(content, Encoding.UTF8)
    {
    }

    public JsonContent(string content, Encoding encoding)
        : base(content, encoding, "application/json")
    {
    }
}

public class XmlContent : StringContent
{
    public XmlContent(string content) 
        : this(content, Encoding.UTF8)
    {
    }

    public XmlContent(string content, Encoding encoding)
        : base(content, encoding, "application/xml")
    {
    }
}