Mike Goodwin answer is great but it seemed, when I tried it, that it was aimed at MVC5/WebApi 2.1. The dependencies for Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Cors didn't play nicely with my MVC4 project.
The simplest way to enable CORS on WebApi with MVC4 was the following.
Note that I have allowed all, I suggest you limit the Origin's to just the clients you want your API to serve. Allowing everything is a security risk.
<system.webServer>
<httpProtocol>
<customHeaders>
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Methods" value="GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, HEAD" />
<add name="Access-Control-Allow-Headers" value="Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept" />
</customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>
</system.webServer>
We do this to allow the OPTIONS http verb
public class BaseApiController : ApiController
{
public HttpResponseMessage Options()
{
return new HttpResponseMessage { StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.OK };
}
}