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Im building myself an asp.net mvc 4 web api

I've been through the Microsoft videos and I think they are good. Http Verbs are used. Resources are nouns, it's dandy with repositories, etc.

But one thing really bugs me

I'm under the impression that this GET http://www.myurl.com/api/sellers/{id}/products is restful and GET http://www.myurl.com/api/products?$filter = sellerID eq {id} is not.

All I see in what I've read about the new web api is the former latter.

Is there native support for the latter former? If not, is there a way to do it without routing everything?

Edit-
Im looking for something that will allow GET http://www.myurl.com/api/sellers/{id}/products and GET http://www.myurl.com/api/products etc

Update:
This question didn't make sense for a while, I've fixed that, but that's why the first answer isn't marked as correct.

Update:
After chatting with MilkyWayJoe we talked about converting /Seller/2/Products to /Products?$filter = sellerID eq 2. Has anybody got any idea on how one can go about doing this?

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3 Answers 3

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3

The url http://www.myurl.com/api/products?$filter= sellerID eq {id} is using OData filters, which in the Web API is consumed out of the box when your controller is returning the collection as IQuerable. The default in VS 2012 is currently set to IEnumerable, which does not support OData.

You can find more about this here and here.

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11 Comments

I'm sorry, I accidentally said the latter when I meant the former. I've edited and fixed the question.
@MrJD Look at Programming Hero's response. It's basically a different routing pattern which resembles rails' routes. Check this as well, you'll see there are other similar routes, e.g. GET /people/1/edit which is essentially a GET
I'm only prepending get to explicitly define a verb. Its not necessarily related to the question. That method would require me to route each nested situation for each endpoint. I want a way to abstract away from that.
I don't know how else you'd register routes to query based on FK (probably because of my lack of experience with url routing). I usually register routes for these scenarios similarly to that, and again, this is a convention that's pretty similar to rails and/or sinatra routes (if not exactly the same), so IMHO you'd have to register these other routes.
Would it be possible to register a "nesting" area, such as `{nestedArea}/products' and then somehow turn it into OData? Or somehow use the iQuerable result?
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It is possible to have nested resources (at least in URL construction), but there's not a great deal of support for in MVC; you'll have to do most of the work yourself.

Firstly, you'll need to create a route to deal with your structure:

url: "sellers/{sellerId}/products",
defaults: new { controller = "sellers", action = "GetProducts" }

Then, you'll want to create the GetProducts action on your "Sellers" controller, which this route should direct callers to:

[HttpGet]
public IEnumerable<Product> GetProducts(int sellerId)
{
    //TODO: Add query to return results.
}

The sellerId parameter will be passed in through the route and should be used to drive your query.

The major drawback to this approach is that the custom route makes it harder to generate URLs for links between resources, and when they get more complicated they can start matching URLs you didn't expect them to.

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3 Comments

My question specified 'without routing everything'. This does work, however i don't want to have to create 4 routes for deep nesting for a single endpoint. Its just not efficient.
Alas, as I said, MVC4 does not naturally support what you're trying to do. You can make your routes re-usable by defining more parameters in them, but ultimately if you want to have a particular URL resolve to a particular action and controller, the routing system was designed to solve this problem.
I'm just looking for variable routing. Read the very end of the comments on MilkyWayJoe's answer. I mention converting routing parameters to an OData structure
2

I'm looking for a solution to your same problem. I'm currently testing this solution.

First of all, change the Route:

    routes.MapHttpRoute(
            name: "DefaultApi",
            routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}/{action}/{id2}",
            defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional, action = "Index", id2 = RouteParameter.Optional }
        );

Then, if you want a SellersController, write it as normal, but name all the action `Index' and use notations to route the http verb correctly. For example:

     [HttpGet]
     public List<Seller> Index()
     {}

Then, in SellersController, create actions naming them as your "internal" object (Products).

     [HttpGet]
     public List<Product> Products(int id)
     {}

     [HttpGet]
     public Product Products(int id, int id2)
     {}

In this way you can call

     GET /api/sellers
     or GET /api/sellers/99/products
     or GET /api/sellers/99/products/2

I'm actually testing this approach, so any feedback would be appreciated!

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1 Comment

That's clever. However it doesn't scale like I want. For instance. Let's say products can have reviews, and you want to request all reviews for seller 142. The request would look like: /sellers/142/products/reviews. That's a 3 level request. Sadly it seems your example can handle up to two

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