How can I convince IE to simply display application json rather than offer to download it

Question

While debugging jQuery apps that use AJAX  I often have the need to see the json that is being returned by the service to the browser   So I ll drop the URL for the JSON data into the address bar   This is nice with ASPNET because in the event of a coding error  I can see the ASPNET diagostic in the browser      But when the server-side code works correctly and actually returns JSON  IE prompts me to download it  so I can t see the response      Can I get IE to NOT do that  in other words  to just display it as if it were plain text   I know I could do this if I set the Content-Type header to be text plain     But this is specifically an the context of an ASPNET MVC app  which sets the response automagically when I use JsonResult on one of my action methods   Also I kinda want to keep the appropriate content-type  and not change it just to support debugging efforts

User · Answer

I use Fiddler with JSONViewer plugin to inspect JSON  I don t think it is possible to make IE behave without fiddling with registry perhaps  Here s some information

User · Answer

I found the answer    You can configure IE8 to display application json in the browser window by updating the registry   There s no need for an external tool  I haven t tested this broadly  but it works with IE8 on Vista     To use this  remember  all the usual caveats about updating the registry apply   Stop IE   Then  cut and paste the following into a file  by the name of json-ie reg     Windows Registry Editor Version 5 00     Tell IE to open JSON documents in the browser      25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13 is the CLSID for the  Browse in place          HKEY CLASSES ROOT MIME Database Content Type application json   CLSID    25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13    Encoding  hex 08 00 00 00   HKEY CLASSES ROOT MIME Database Content Type text json   CLSID    25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13    Encoding  hex 08 00 00 00   Then double-click the  reg file   Restart IE   The new behavior you get when tickling a URL that returns a doc with Content-Type  application json or Content-Type  text json is like this      What it does  why it works    The 25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13 is the CLSID for the  Browse in place  action   Basically this registry entry is telling IE that for docs that have a mime type of application json  just view it in place   This won t affect any application json documents downloaded via  lt script gt  tags  or via XHR  and so on    The CLSID and Encoding keys get the same values used for image gif  image jpeg  and text html     This hint came from this site  and from Microsoft s article Handling MIME Types in Internet Explorer       In FF  you don t need an external add-on either  You can just use the view-source  pseudo-protocol   Enter a URL like this into the address bar    view-source http   myserver MyUrl That emits Application json   This pseudo-protocol used to be supported in IE  also  until WinXP-sp2  when Microsoft disabled it for security reasons

User · Answer

Changing IE s JSON mime-type settings will effect the way IE treats all JSON responses   Changing the mime-type header to text html will effectively tell any browser that the JSON response you are returning is not JSON but plain text   Neither options are preferable   Instead you would want to use a plugin or tool like the above mentioned Fiddler or any other network traffic inspector proxy where you can choose each time how to process the JSON response

User · Answer

You could see the response in Fiddler  http   www fiddler2 com fiddler2   That s nice tool for such things

User · Answer

Above solution was missing thing  and below code should work in every situation   Windows Registry Editor Version 5 00     Tell IE to open JSON documents in the browser      25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13 is the CLSID for the  Browse in place          HKEY CLASSES ROOT MIME Database Content Type application json   CLSID    25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13    Encoding  hex 08 00 00 00   HKEY CLASSES ROOT MIME Database Content Type application x-json   CLSID    25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13    Encoding  hex 08 00 00 00   HKEY CLASSES ROOT MIME Database Content Type text json   CLSID    25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13    Encoding  hex 08 00 00 00   Just save it file json reg  and run to modify your registry

User · Answer

FireFox   FireBug is very good for this purpose  For IE there s a developer toolbar which I ve never used and intend to use so I cannot provide much feedback

User · Answer

If you are okay with just having IE open the JSON into a notepad  you can change your system s default program for  json files to Notepad   To do this  create or find a  json file  right mouse click  and select  Open With  or  Choose Default Program    This might come in handy if you by chance want to use Internet Explorer but your IT company wont let you edit your registry  Otherwise  I recommend the above answers

User · Answer

I just had the same issue with an XMLHttpRequest   The site functions flawlessly in Chrome and FF  and in dozens upon dozens of Internet Explorer browsers in production   This ONE machine  the one our company is setting up to be a demo machine  of course  decided that it was going to prompt to save the json response to an ajax request   The accepted regedit solution below fixed it   Thanks

User · Answer

I had a similar problem  I was using the     GetJSON  jQuery and everything worked perfectly in Firefox and Chrome   But it did not work in IE  So I tried to directly access the URL of json  but in IE it asked if I wanted to download the file   After much searching I saw that there must be a header in the result with a content-type  in my case  the content-type was   header  Content-type  text html  charset iso-8859-1      But when the page that made the request receives this json  in IE  you have to be specified SAME CONTENT-TYPE  in my case was     getJSON     lt   site url php echo    ajax   tipoMenu     gt    contentType   text   html  charset   utf-8    function  result      hugs

[jquery] How can I convince IE to simply display application/json rather than offer to download it?

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