I'd read it somewhere that whenever one needs to do data intensive work then Webapi could be used. Ex: autocomplete textbox where we get data from using ajax on key press.
Now someone told me that Webapi shouldn't be used within applications which are not externally accessed. Rather action should be used to the same work as it is capable of returning the data back in a similar fashion to webapi.
I'd like to know your suggestions over it.
Depends on how you look at it. If all you need is ajax-ification of your controller actions, then you really don't need Web-API. Your actions can return a JsonResult and it is very easy to consume that from your client side through an AJAX call.
Web-API makes it easy for you to expose you actions to external clients. It supports HTTP protocol and Json and XML payloads automatically, out of the box, without you writing the code for it. Now, there is nothing preventing you from consuming the same Web-API actions from your own internal clients in an AJAX manner.
So the answer to your question depends on your design. If you don't have external clients, then there is no string need for you to have Web-API. Your standard controller actions can do the job.
Related
There are a lot of answers on how to convert ODataQuery into an Expression or into a Lambda, but what I need is quite the opposite, how to get from a Linq Expression the OData query string.
Basically what I want is to transcend the query to another service. For example, having 2 services, where your first service is not persisting anything and your second service is the one that will return the data from a database. Service1 sends the same odata request to Service2 and it can add more parameters to the original odata request to Service2
What I would like:
public IActionResult GetWeatherForecast([FromServices] IWeatherForcastService weatherForcastService)
{
//IQueryable here
var summaries = weatherForcastService.GetSummariesIQ();
var url = OdataMagicHelper.ConvertToUri(summaries);
var data = RestClient2.Get(url);
return data;
}
OP Clarified the request: generate OData query URLs from within the API itself.
Usually, the queries are so specific or simple, that it's not really necessary to try and generate OData urls from within the service, the whole point of the service configuration is to publish how the client could call anything, so it's a little bit redundant or counter-intuitive to return complex resource query URLs from within the service itself.
We can use Simple.OData.Client to build OData urls:
If the URL that we want to generate is:
{service2}/api/v1/weather_forecast?$select=Description
Then you could use Simple.OData.Client:
string service2Url = "http://localhost:11111/api/v1/";
var client = new ODataClient(service2Url);
var url = await client.For("weather_forecast")
.Select("Description")
.GetCommandTextAsync();
Background, for client-side solutions
If your OData service is a client for another OData Service, then this advice is still relevant
For full linq support you should be using OData Connected Services or Simple.OData.Client. You could roll your own, or use other derivatives of these two but why go to all that effort to re-create another wheel.
One of the main drivers for a OData Standard Compliant API is that the meta data is published in a standard format that clients can inspect and can generate consistent code and or dynamic queries to interact with the service.
How to choose:
Simple.OData.Client provides a lightweight framework for dynamically querying and submitting data to OData APIs. If you already have classes that model the structure of the API then you can use typed linq style query syntax, if you do not have a strongly typed model but you do know the structure of the API, then you can use either the untyped or dynamic expression syntax to query the API.
If you do not need full compile-time validation of your queries or you already have the classes that represent the resources served by the API then this is a simple enough interface to use.
This library is perfect for use inside your API logic if you have need of generating complex URLs in a strongly typed style of code without trying to generate a context to manage the connectivity to the server.
NOTE: Simple.OData.Client is sometimes less practical when developing against a large API that is rapidly evolving or that does not have a strict versioned route policy. If the API changes you will need to diligently refactor your code to match and will have to rely on extensive regression testing.
OData Connected Services follows a pattern where some or all of the API is modelled in the client with strongly typed client side proxy interfaces. These are POCO classes that have the structure necessary to send to and receive data from the server.
The major benefit to this method is that the POCO structures, requests and responses are validated against the schema of the API. This effectively gives you full intellisense support for the API and allows you to explor it's structure, the generated code becomes your documentation. It also gives you compile time checking and runtime safety.
The general development workflow after the API is deployed or updated is:
Download the $metadata document
Select the Operations and Types from the API that you want to model
Generate classes to represent the selected DTO Types as defined in the document, so all the inputs and outputs.
Now you can start using the code.
In VS 2022/19/17 the Connected Services interface provides a simple wizard for establishing the initial connection and for updating (or re-generating) when you need to.
The OData Connected Service or other client side proxy generation pattern suits projects under these criteria:
The API definition is relatively stable
The API definition is in a state of flux
You consume many endpoints
You don't want to manually code the types to serialize or deserialze payloads
Full disclosure, I prefer the connected service approach, but I have my own generation scripts. However if you are trying to generate OData query urls from inside your API, its not really an option, it creates a messy recursive dependency... just don't go there.
Connected services is the low-(manual)-code and lazy approach that is perfect for a stable API, generate once and never do it again. But the Connected Service architecture is perfect for a rapidly changing API because it will manage the minute changes to the classes for you, you just need to update your client side proxy classes more frequently.
I have just completed my first API in Apigility. Right now it is basically a gateway to a database, storing and retrieving multi-page documents uploaded through an app.
Now I want to run some processing on the documents, e.g. process them through a 3rd party API or modify the image quality etc., and return them to the app users.
Where (in which class) do I generally put such logic? My first reflex would be to implement such logic in the Resource-Classes. However I feel that they will become quite messy, obstructing a clear view on the API's interface in the code and creating a dependency on a foreign API. Also, I feel limited because each method corresponds to an API call.
What if there is a certain processing/computing time? Meaning I cannot direct respond the result through a GET request. I thought about running an asynchronous process and send a push notification to the app, once the processing is complete. But again, where in the could would I ideally implement such processing logic?
I would be very happy to receive some architectural advice from someone who is more seasoned in developing APIs. Thank you.
You are able to use the zf-rest resource events to connect listeners with your additional custom logic without polluting your resources.
These events are fired in the RestController class (for example a post.create event here on line 382).
When you use Apigility-Doctrine module you can also use the events triggered in the DoctrineResource class (for example the DoctrineResourceEvent::EVENT_CREATE_POST event here on line 361) to connect your listeners.
You can use a queueing service like ZendQueue or something (a third party module) built on top of ZendQueue for managing that. You can find different ZF2 queueing systems/modules using Google.
By injecting the queueing service into your listener you can simply push your jobs directly into your queue.
I am creating a Web Api integrates with SignalR.
I want to create a Web Api method that will receive a string/object as parameter (from an winform exe) and broadcast it to all the SignalR clients.
I know that Web Api uses HTTP requests like PUT DELETE POST GET. All of these requests are database related, i.e. PUT for Update, DELETE for Delete, POST for Insert, GET for Select.
In this case, which HTTP request should I use?
public void BroadcastToClients() {}
Or should I consider WCF instead of Web Api?
People tend to get all up-tight about "pure" REST vs just getting something to work. For every cited reference that argues for one scheme, you can find another that is the opposite.
My very personal opinion is that POST is when something new is to be created, and PUT when an entity is to be updated.
I think the important thing is to just be consistent.
Long story as brief as possible...
I have an existing application that I'm trying to get ServiceStack into to create our new API. This app is currently an MVC3 app and uses the UnitOfWork pattern using Attribute Injection on MVC routes to create/finalize a transaction where the attribute is applied.
Trying to accomplish something similar using ServiceStack
This gist
shows the relevant ServiceStack configuration settings. What I am curious about is the global request/response filters -- these will create a new unit of work for each request and close it before sending the response to the client (there is a check in there so if an error occurs writing to the db, we return an appropriate response to the client, and not a false "success" message)
My questions are:
Is this a good idea or not, or is there a better way to do
this with ServiceStack.
In the MVC site we only create a new unit
of work on an action that will add/update/delete data - should we do
something similar here or is it fine to create a transaction only to retrieve data?
As mentioned in ServiceStack's IOC wiki the Funq IOC registers dependencies as a singleton by default. So to register it with RequestScope you need to specify it as done here:
container.RegisterAutoWiredAs<NHibernateUnitOfWork, IUnitOfWork()
.ReusedWithin(ReuseScope.Request);
Although this is not likely what you want as it registers as a singleton, i.e. the same instance returned for every request:
container.Register<ISession>((c) => {
var uow = (INHibernateUnitOfWork) c.Resolve<IUnitOfWork>();
return uow.Session;
});
You probably want to make this:
.ReusedWithin(ReuseScope.Request); //per request
.ReusedWithin(ReuseScope.None); //Executed each time its injected
Using a RequestScope also works for Global Request/Response filters which will get the same instance as used in the Service.
1) Whether you are using ServiceStack, MVC, WCF, Nancy, or any other web framework, the most common method to use is the session-per-request pattern. In web terms, this means creating a new unit of work in the beginning of the request and disposing of the unit of work at the end of the request. Almost all web frameworks have hooks for these events.
Resources:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/13206256/670028
https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=servicestack+session+per+request
2) You should always interact with NHibernate within a transaction.
Please see any of the following for an explanation of why:
http://ayende.com/blog/3775/nh-prof-alerts-use-of-implicit-transactions-is-discouraged
http://www.hibernatingrhinos.com/products/nhprof/learn/alert/DoNotUseImplicitTransactions
Note that when switching to using transactions with reads, be sure to make yourself aware of NULL behavior: http://www.zvolkov.com/clog/2009/07/09/why-nhibernate-updates-db-on-commit-of-read-only-transaction/#comments
If you have a decent layered ASP.NET MVC 3 web application with a data service class pumping out view models pulled from a repository, sending JSON to an Ajax client,
[taking a breath]
what's a good way to add data filtering based on ASP.NET logins and roles without really messing up our data service class with these concerns?
We have a repository that kicks out Entity Framework 4.1 POCOs which accepts Lambda Expressions for where clauses (or specification objects.)
The data service class creates query objects (like IQueryable) then returns them with .ToList() in the return statement.
I'm thinking maybe a specification that handles security roles passed to the data service class, or somehow essentially injecting a Lambda Expression in just the right place in the data service class?
I am sure there is a fairly standardized pattern to implement something like this. Links to examples or books on the subject would be most appreciated.
If you've got a single-tiered application (as in, your web layer and service/data layer all run in the same process) then it's common to use a custom principal to achieve what you want.
You can use a custom principal to store extra data about a user (have a watch of this: http://www.asp.net/security/videos/use-custom-principal-objects), but the trick is to set this custom principal into the current thread's principal also, by doing Thread.CurrentPrincipal = myPrincipal
This effectively means that you can get access to your user/role information from deep into your service layer without creating extra parameters on your methods (which is bad design). You can do this by querying Thread.CurrentPrincipal and cast it to your own implementation.
If your service/data layer exists in a different process (perhaps you're using web services) then you can still pass your user information separately from your method calls, by passing custom data headers along with the service request and leave this kind of data out of your method calls.
Edit: to relate back to your querying of data, obviously any queries you write which are influence by some aspect of the currently logged-in user or their role can be picked up by looking at the data in your custom principal, but without passing special data through your method calls.
Hopefully this at least points you in the right direction.
It is not clear from your question if you are using DI, as you mentioned you have your layers split up properly I am presuming so, then again this should be possible without DI I think...
Create an interface called IUserSession or something similar, Implement that inside your asp.net mvc application, the interface can contain something like GetUser(); from this info I am sure you can filter data inside your middle tier, otherwise you can simply use this IUserSession inside your web application and do the filtering inside that tier...
See: https://gist.github.com/1042173