ASP.Net Web Api Controller Design Guidelines

Question

I have multiple resources which I want to expose through following URIs

http:///countries GET
http:///states?countryCode=** GET
http:///persons GET, POST, PUT, DELETE

I am using Asp.Net Web API to build RESTful service to access these resource.

What would be the best practice while creating controllers for these? Should I create separate controller for each resource? Or there is some way to map these urls to actions of a single controller?

Single controller class will help If I use DependencyResolver as I saw DependencyResolver can return instance of a single Controller. (I may be wrong here)

I need dependency resolver as my controller classes will have some repository object through constructor injection.

I won't use any IoC, only poor man's DI.

One Addition

I have successfully designed this problem in WCF Web Api used for REST, but not in Asp.Net Web API. I am new in this.

Neil Thompson · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-18 13:05:10Z

3

Create a separate controller for each resource.

It's a bad idea to ruin your API because you are having DI issues.

The free Apigee Web API Design ebook is very short, extremely good and certainly worth reading.

answered Jun 18, 2013 at 13:05

Neil Thompson

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4 Comments

Bijit Over a year ago

Thanks Neil...but didn't get your comment "It's a bad idea to ruin your API because you are having DI issues." If I used separate controller then how to resolve constructor dependency using dependency resolver??

Neil Thompson Over a year ago

Hi Bijit. Maybe I misunderstood you, but it sounded like the main reason you were considering a single controller for Countries, States and Persons was that you had some complication with automatically injecting dependencies into multiple controllers. If this is the case you might want to post a separate question; If not, my bad.

Bijit Over a year ago

You got right Neil. Any way i solved the issue using IHttpControllerActivator instead of IDependencyResolver for composing Controllers.

Stephen Zeng Over a year ago

Based on SOLID principles you should put them into different controllers. And it's extremely easy to set up DI by using framework such as autofac.

mkorman · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-27 17:08:16Z

0

As Neil mentioned above, the best practice would be to create 3 different controllers:

CountriesController
StatesController
PersonsController

If you derive them from ApiController, they will be automatically available under the following urls:

/api/countries
/api/states
/api/persons

If you derive from Controller, they will be available under the following urls:

/countries
/states
/persons

As for the dependency injection, you could derive from your own BaseController and inject all the dependencies there if that's what you absolutely need. Or each class could require a different interface and have your DI resolve that.

Hope it helps!

answered Aug 27, 2013 at 17:08

mkorman

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Comments

Krishna Gupta · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-10 15:16:45Z

Multiple different urls can be mapped to the actions of a single controller, in Web API. Here's how it can be done:

In WebApiConfig.cs under the App_Start folder, the default mapping gets automatically created as:

    public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
    {
        config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
            name: "DefaultApi",
            routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}",
            defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
        );
    }

To map action methods as well, add an {action} parameter in the routeTemplate in the above route, as follows:

            routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}/{id}",

Now you can create a single Controller, with different Action Methods, to match your requests. The Controller actions would look like this:

    // Reached by /api/controllername/getcountries
    public IEnumerable<string> GetCountries()
    {
        // Custom code
    }


    // Reached by /api/controllername/getstates/countrycode
    public IEnumerable<string> GetStates(string id)
    {
        // id contains the countrycode string
    }

Make sure that the action methods names still begin with the HTTP verbs: Get | Put | Post | Delete, though!

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