Strings sent through Web API’s gets wrapped in quotes

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The quotes and backslashes are being added at each “proxy” API as the JSON string is re-serialized for each response, not when the response is received.

In your proxy API, presumably you are doing something like this (error handling omitted for brevity):

[HttpGet]
public async Task<HttpResponseMessage> GetWidget(int id)
{
    HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
    string url = "http://nextapiserver.example.org/widgets/" + id;
    string json = await client.GetStringAsync(url);
    return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, json);
}

The problem here is that Web API assumes by default that it is responsible for serializing anything you give it. For most use cases, this is exactly what you would want. But if your content is already serialized to JSON, Web API has no way of knowing that; it will happily re-serialize the string, adding extra quotes and backslashes in the process.

To pass through a JSON string untouched, you need to explicitly create the response content object (rather than letting Web API create it), making sure to set the media type to so that downstream clients will still interpret it as JSON (rather than plain text). Here is the revised code:

[HttpGet]
public async Task<HttpResponseMessage> GetWidget(int id)
{
    HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
    string url = "http://nextapiserver.example.org/widgets/" + id;
    string json = await client.GetStringAsync(url);
    HttpResponseMessage response = Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK);
    response.Content = new StringContent(json, Encoding.UTF8, "application/json");
    return response;
}

I’m sure the above can improved, but that is the gist of it. Give it a shot and see if it solves the issue for you. Note that you will need to apply this fix on all the proxy APIs.

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