CODEWITHSUNDEEP
angularjsasp.net-web-api
Thea
Thea

Reputation: 161

In my Angular.js app - Should I bind to the model that the Web API provides

I'm building an application with Angular and ASP.Net MVC.

All the data that I use in the application is provided by a Web API (I'm making Ajax calls to my ASP.Net controllers, which in turn call the Web API and return the API's response to the html page).

The models that the web api uses map my needs very well and I don't really have to change anything.

But should I simply bind to the model provided by the Web API? The risk I'm seeing is that if anything changes in the Web API, I might end up changing all over in my application. If I translate the web api model to my own in one place, I will only have to do changes there.

But on the other hand - mapping the Web API model to my own seems like a big unnecessary job, when the models will end up practically the same.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 537

Answers (3)

user2626270
user2626270

Reputation: 258

1 - Browser makes calls to WebAPI

2 - WebAPI returns JSON data - which is actually domain (or model) objects - replicas of database tables.

3 - Javascript translates those JSON objects into different objects depending on your presentation (presentations are always sophisticated - tables, graphs, lists, formated things, pivot tables).

4 - HTML is bound to those sophisticated javascript objects

You can find very beautiful examples here: upida4net.codeplex.com with knockout and angular.

Upvotes: 0

Chandermani
Chandermani

Reputation: 42669

One place where we used mapper was mapping for .net properties Pascal case to json properties camelCase.

But look at this blog post, even this can be fixed by providing a correct media formatter, and hence the mapping layer can be removed.

Mapping layer should be used for case by case basis. Hope it help you.

Upvotes: 0

Mark Coleman
Mark Coleman

Reputation: 40863

Keep things simple, introducing a mapping layer when you have control over both sides of the application seems unnecessary.

Only introduce extra complexity when it is required, for instance in our application we use asp.net w/ Nancyfx as our rest api. There are a few times we map from the api to models but those are specialized circumstances (model that contains data but also behavior).

Upvotes: 1

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