Enabling Cross-Origin Requests (CORS) in ASP.NET Web API 2

Browser security prevents a web page from making AJAX requests to another domain. This restriction is called the same-origin policy, and prevents a malicious site from reading sentitive data from another site. However, sometimes you might want to let other sites call your web API.

Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a W3C standard that allows a server to relax the same-origin policy. Using CORS, a server can explicitly allow some cross-origin requests while rejecting others. CORS is safer and more flexible than earlier techniques such as JSONP. This tutorial shows how to enable CORS in your Web API application.

Enable CORS

Now let's enable CORS in the WebService app. First, add the CORS NuGet package. In Visual Studio, from the Tools menu, select Library Package Manager, then select Package Manager Console. In the Package Manager Console window, type the following command:

 

PowerShell

Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Cors

This command installs the latest package and updates all dependencies, including the core Web API libraries. User the -Version flag to target a specific version. The CORS package requires Web API 2.0 or later.

 

Open the file App_Start/WebApiConfig.cs. Add the following code to the 

WebApiConfig.Register method.

C#

using System.Web.Http;
namespace WebService
{
    public static class WebApiConfig
    {
        public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
        {
            // New code
            config.EnableCors();

            config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
                name: "DefaultApi",
                routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}",
                defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
            );
        }
    }
}

Next, add the [EnableCors] attribute to the TestController class:

C#

using System.Net.Http;
using System.Web.Http;
using System.Web.Http.Cors;

namespace WebService.Controllers
{
    [EnableCors(origins: "http://mywebclient.azurewebsites.net", headers: "*", methods: "*")]
    public class TestController : ApiController
    {
        // Controller methods not shown...
    }
}