CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net-web-apiasp.net-mvc-5
David Choi
David Choi

Reputation: 6619

Calling a WebApi as a class instance

This is more of a design question than a problem. So here's the scenario, you have an asp.net 5 application with a webapi controller and it provides data to many types of clients: web, ios, java apps, etc. Let's say that one of those clients happens to be an mvc controller within the same web host and visual studio solution as the webapi.

What are the ramifications of calling into the webapi as a class instance, instead of doing what the other client types are doing--which is to make a rest based network call? The obvious benefits are eliminating the over head of a network call and eliminating the serialization. But I wanted to know what some of the possible negatives could be. Has anyone done this before?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 87

Answers (2)

Romias
Romias

Reputation: 14133

The easy solution could be that you could extract that logic to a separate assembly... let say a "Business Logic Layer" so that both WebApi and MVC could access it.

This has the downside, that you will not be able to have MVC and WebApi separate. I mean, using WebApi as a single data interface could allow you to host MVC app separately from where the WebApi is hosted... but the approach in the first paragraph will couple both proyects and will force you to host them together to have access to the data.

Upvotes: 2

Juan
Juan

Reputation: 3705

If you call the class directly any work done by the HTTP pipeline won't be done. So your API class won't have access to the HttpContext for example.

Also none of the security or Http related annotations (attributes) will work, so your MVC controller may need to deal with that.

Upvotes: 1

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