MVC web api: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource

Question

I tried everything that is written in this article: http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/security/enabling-cross-origin-requests-in-web-api, but nothing works. I'm trying to get data from webAPI2 (MVC5) to use in another domain using angularJS.

my controller looks like this:

namespace tapuzWebAPI.Controllers
{
    [EnableCors(origins: "http://local.tapuz.co.il", headers: "*", methods: "*", SupportsCredentials = true)]
    [RoutePrefix("api/homepage")]
    public class HomePageController : ApiController
    {
        [HttpGet]
        [Route("GetMainItems")]
        //[ResponseType(typeof(Product))]
        public List<usp_MobileSelectTopSecondaryItemsByCategoryResult> GetMainItems()
        {


            HomePageDALcs dal = new HomePageDALcs();
            //Three product added to display the data

            //HomePagePromotedItems.Value.Add(new HomePagePromotedItem.Value.FirstOrDefault((p) => p.ID == id));


            List<usp_MobileSelectTopSecondaryItemsByCategoryResult> items = dal.MobileSelectTopSecondaryItemsByCategory(3, 5);
            return items;

        }      
    }
}

Answer 1

You need to enable CORS in your Web Api. The easier and preferred way to enable CORS globally is to add the following into web.config

<system.webServer>
  <httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
      <add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*" />
      <add name="Access-Control-Allow-Headers" value="Content-Type" />
      <add name="Access-Control-Allow-Methods" value="GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS" />
    </customHeaders>
  </httpProtocol>
</system.webServer>

Please note that the Methods are all individually specified, instead of using *. This is because there is a bug occurring when using *.

You can also enable CORS by code.

Update
The following NuGet package is required: Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Cors.

public static class WebApiConfig
{
    public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
    {
        config.EnableCors();

        // ...
    }
}

Then you can use the [EnableCors] attribute on Actions or Controllers like this

[EnableCors(origins: "http://www.example.com", headers: "*", methods: "*")]

Or you can register it globally

public static class WebApiConfig
{
    public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
    {
        var cors = new EnableCorsAttribute("http://www.example.com", "*", "*");
        config.EnableCors(cors);

        // ...
    }
}

You also need to handle the preflight Options requests with HTTP OPTIONS requests.

Web API needs to respond to the Options request in order to confirm that it is indeed configured to support CORS.

To handle this, all you need to do is send an empty response back. You can do this inside your actions, or you can do it globally like this:

# Global.asax.cs
protected void Application_BeginRequest()
{
    if (Request.Headers.AllKeys.Contains("Origin") && Request.HttpMethod == "OPTIONS")
    {
        Response.Flush();
    }
}

This extra check was added to ensure that old APIs that were designed to accept only GET and POST requests will not be exploited. Imagine sending a DELETE request to an API designed when this verb didn't exist. The outcome is unpredictable and the results might be dangerous.