On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Andrew Beverley <andy@andybev.com> wrote:

Hi guys,

Hi Andrew. :)

I apologise in advance that this is rather vague, but I'm hoping that
someone might be able to point me in the right direction of where I
should be looking.

Not at all! That is an excellent question.

[...] so I won't go into the details here, but I wondered whether
someone can point me to the relevant parts of the Dancer2 code that I
should start poking around in (in particular the code which detects
whether to serialize the data).

You can see that Dancer2::Core::Request checks for a supported content type. The line is:

return unless $self->serializer->support_content_type($content_type);

However, in Dancer2::Core::Response, it doesn't check for a supported content type in the request in order to serialize a response back. This would be the correct behavior since a serializer basically says "I would like to serialize my responses" and not "I would like to serialize my responses IF the request was made with a header". The reason it ignores any request header in the response is because it is, by definition, a *request* header. This means it only relates to the request, not the response.

If you would like to return HTML and serialized information, you have two options:

1. Separate the code that accepts and returns serialized data into two different Dancer2 apps.

2. Don't use a serializer, and call the to_json and from_json when *you* decide it's the right time for it.

I hope this answer helps.