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asp.netasp.net-web-api
John John
John John

Reputation: 1

How to develop RESTfull web serivces using asp.net Web API

I have read about the asp.net Web API ,, but i am not sure if i understand the concept behind the Web API tool. now let say that i have defined a Controller that is derived from the APIController, and i can call this Controller using URL , and then the Controller will return JSON result to the client,,,

so does this means that the APIController inside my asp.net MVC web application is exposed as a RESTfull web service? BR

Upvotes: 0

Views: 274

Answers (3)

Parv Sharma
Parv Sharma

Reputation: 12705

i just want to add to Anders

REST stands for Representational state transfer
so basically in architecture you choose a resource like http://www.example.com/USER
and you instruct the server to do operations on the resource. Specified by the type of HTTP request being sent
going by what web api comes out of the box
POST - add a new user
PUT - edits an existing users info
GET - simply retrives user(s) info
DELETE - deletes users info
and this is REST

The type of data being sent or recived (JSON or XML). isnt a part of rest specifications. also you can decide incase of asp.net web api data is returned and sent in what format by using Accept and Content-Type headers with your request

Upvotes: 1

Anders Arpi
Anders Arpi

Reputation: 8397

Whether or not your API is considered 'RESTfull' is a question of design, not a question of which libraries/project templates are used. Remember that the whole point of an API is to expose a simple programming interface - how it's implemented behind the scenes isn't important in that regard.

However, the WebAPI project template does lend itself well to designing a restfull service due to its built in design principles.

The basic idea behind a REST API is:

  • Use HTTP protocol (which WebAPI does, so check)
  • Expose a simple API for handling data, usually with POST/GET/PUT/DELETE methods tied to data handling (this is what the WebAPI design lends itself well to)
  • Transfer data in an interoperable format (JSON, XML, also easily doable in WebAPI)

It's not much different from designing a REST API using basic MVC Controller/Actions, WebAPI just makes it a bit easier.

Here's a nice video series: http://www.asp.net/web-api/videos/getting-started/your-first-web-api

Upvotes: 2

Denis Agarev
Denis Agarev

Reputation: 1529

Well Apicontroller totaly different from mvc Controller, it comes from Wcf WebApi but made very similar to classic asp.net controllers to developers. The main point is to speed up making restfull services.

So you just assign one more route as always, making some controller than takes querystring and body json(as default) and autoconverts in to Poco classes and returns you another Poco classes serialized to jsion automatically.

Upvotes: 0

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