CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#winformswcfasp.net-mvc-4asp.net-web-api
Bram van den Besselaar
Bram van den Besselaar

Reputation: 89

Web Service or web API for connecting a windows application to MVC 4?

After searching the entire day about what I should use, I'm not sure what option would be best for my needs so I hope someone with more experience could help me out.

I have a winforms application (c#) and a ASP.NET MVC 4 web application (c#). I wish to connect these, the goal is to send and receive data from the database which I use in the MVC 4 project, but from within the windows forms application. The data I send from the windows forms application to the database, is then used by the MVC 4 web application.

I am entirely new to web services / Web Api's so I can't really decide what option would be best. Any help would be much appreciated..

Upvotes: 7

Views: 4656

Answers (6)

Slack Shot
Slack Shot

Reputation: 1110

Rather than advocate specifically WCF, I'd recommend WCF Data Services or OData, with the stipulation that you'll need to secure it. If you go for pure WCF, you'll see that you'll end up creating a lot of code to handle retrieving the info from a database, and then sending that information right back out to your clients. It doesn't sound that bad, at first, but after about 30 entities in a database, you'll quickly grow tired of a pure WCF solution.

OData is great, it uses Entity Framework, and it quickly opens data manipulation for an existing database or one you are going to make. It will save you a ton of development time, if you can make your service secure. The format of the data response is flexible. There are plenty of client libraries ported for other programming languages as well.

The steps for securing a service are pretty simple. Always deploy to https. Any login or registration methods , need to be post methods, that return a token (Encrypted value), or a unique secret that can be encrypted and sent back for any subsequent requests. It's better to use the token, and have an expiration on the token.. because otherwise both your service and your app whether mobile or desktop, need to have a shared encryption / decryption method.

Upvotes: 0

Yaur
Yaur

Reputation: 7452

We had some issues with MVC4 WebApi stuff and ended up using ServiceStack on the server side JavaScript/AJAX for web clients and RestSharp for thick clients.

One of our specific issues was the inability to auto generate documentation, significant performance differences, and better support for unit/integration testing.

Upvotes: 1

Pavlo Sobchuk
Pavlo Sobchuk

Reputation: 1564

If you have an MVC 4 App already, it would be better to use Web API (RESTful service) I assume you have some knowledge in building REST API (understanding of POST, PUT, UPDATE stuff)

It is simple in configuration and usage. All what you need actually is to create a new controller like:

class MyApiController: ApiController {

   public Post(SomeClass item) {
      ....connect to db and do whatever you need with the data
   }
}

You'll also should configure routing for Api.

And then in your winForms app you can simply use HttpClient class to perform api call.

HttpClient aClient = new HttpClient();

// Uri is where we are posting to: 
Uri theUri = new Uri("https://mysite.com/api/MyApi");

// use the Http client to POST some content ( ‘theContent’ not yet defined). 
aClient.PostAsync(theUri, new SomeClass());

Take a look at some implementation details right here: Web Api Getting Started

Get started with WCF is not so easy as with Web API.

Upvotes: 2

cja
cja

Reputation: 10026

Or something lightweight like Nancy: http://nancyfx.org/

Upvotes: 1

Nirmal
Nirmal

Reputation: 934

If you already created MVC4 project then you can add actions to any controller and return JSON data like below :

public JsonResult GetCategoryList()
{
    var list = //return list
    return Json(list, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}

or you can create new project of MVC4 and select WEBAPI template . It will create webapi project for you .It will create with example .so it will easy for to create webapi.In webapi it return data automatically convert to xml and json as per request

The WCF Web API abstractions map to ASP.NET Web API roughly as follows

WCF Web AP -> ASP.NET Web API
Service -> Web API controller
Operation -> Action
Service contract -> Not applicable
Endpoint -> Not applicable
URI templates -> ASP.NET Routing
Message handlers -> Same
Formatters -> Same
Operation handlers -> Filters, model binders

Other Links

Upvotes: 3

KeithS
KeithS

Reputation: 71573

Given the tags you've used, my guess is that you're deciding between SOAP Web Services and WCF. Given these two, I say to go WCF. SOAP web services (as implemented in Visual Studio) are the older technology; still serviceable, but WCF can do everything an older SOAP service can do (including look exactly like a SOAP service) and more.

If you have a web service that connects your web server to your database server (these two things should be on different machines; your web server is exposed to the world by necessity, while your DB server should be locked down like Fort Knox), I see no reason why you shouldn't use that same service as-is for an internal WinForms application (using a LAN/VPN to access the service layer on the DB server). For a WinForms application that must access the data over the Internet, I would recommend reimplementing the service as a WCF service supporting secure encrypted data transfer. You can also set up the service endpoint to only accept HTTPS connections, and thus simply run your existing service through SSL/TLS.

What you choose will primarily depend on how much time-resources you can commit to resolving the problem; moving to HTTPS is a fast fix requiring little if any code changes, while reimplementing in WCF will take more time but will allow additional security measures beyond a simple secure tunnel.

Upvotes: 1

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