Implementing a net-core Web API That Returns Previous Response

Question

I'm currently building a Web API in net-core that has the following requirements:

• All web transactions must have a unique Guid identifier for each endpoint
• If an endpoint is hit with a previously used Guid, then the response that was given for this Guid is returned again

I was attempting to implement this by JsonSerializing the IActionResult inside the WebApi controller, but I ran into an issue where I can't deserialize all IActionResult responses since some don't have a constructor.

For example:

JsonSerializationException: Unable to find a constructor to use for type Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.CreatedResult. A class should either have a default constructor, one constructor with arguments or a constructor marked with the JsonConstructor attribute.

Does anybody know if it's possible to work around this?

Answer 1

Personally, I'd use the response caching middleware. You can make it vary on your GUID, so as long as that is included in the request, it will only render the action if the GUID is different.

Short of that, if you want to handle this manually, cache the JSON you're intending to return, not the full response object. Then, you do not need to re-query the database, etc., and you simply return the response, which is not all that much overhead.