Create Web API for request with code and term query parameters

Question

In ASP.NET MVC4 application Json Web api needs to be created to serve requests with term and code url parameters like:

http://myapp.com/api/customers

returns all customers

http://myapp.com/api/customers?term=partofname

returns 0 .. n customers

and

http://myapp.com/api/customers?code=customercode

returns 1 customer always

code is customer id which can contain / and other characters which are not allowed in url passed to windows http server by http.sys in windows kernel

API controller below is tried but it causes compile error

Error Type 'Erp.Controllers.CustomersController' already defines a member called 'Get' with the same parameter types.

How to fix this ? Which is proper way to create API class for such request? Should odata or different method names used or other way? Application must run in Windows 2003 server and in Mono so Web API v.2 cannot used.

Method and query string parameter names can changed if this helps. Returned data format cannot changed.

 public class CustomersController : ApiController
    {
        public object Get()
        {

            var res = GetAllCustomers();
            return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, 
                new { customers = res.ToArray() } );
        }

        public object Get(string term)
        {

            var res = GetCustomersByTerm(term);
            return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, 
                new { customers = res.ToArray() } );
        }

        public object Get(string code)
        {
            var res = GetCustomersById(code); 
// code is actually unique customer id which can contain / and other characters which are not allowed in 
// url directory names in windows http server
            return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK,
                new { customers = res.ToArray() });
        }
}

default routing is used:

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

Update

I tried answer but search parameter is always null. Whole request is below. How to pass parameters ?

GET /api/customers?term=kaks&_=1385320904347 HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:52216
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.57 Safari/537.36
Referer: http://localhost:52216/erp/Sale
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: et-EE,et;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
Cookie: .myAuth=8B6B3CFFF3DF64EBEF3D258240D217C56603AF255C869FBB7934560D9F560659342DC4D1EAE6AB28454122A86C3CE6C598FB594E8DC84A; My_Session=5aw2bsjp4i4a5vxtekz

Darin Dimitrov · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-24 20:49:21Z

1

You could define a view model:

public class SearchViewModel
{
    public string Term { get; set; }
    public string Code { get; set; }
}

and then group the 2 operations in a single one:

public HttpResponseMessage Get([FromUri] SearchViewModel search)
{
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(search.Code))
    {
        var customer = GetCustomersById(search.Code);
        return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, customer);
    }

    var customers = GetCustomersByTerm(search.Term).ToArray();
    return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, customers);
}

But personally I would go with a more RESTful design:

http://myapp.com/api/customers - return all customers
http://myapp.com/api/customers?term=partofname - return all customers with the specified term
http://myapp.com/api/customers/some_code - return a single customer with the specified code

edited Nov 24, 2013 at 20:49

answered Nov 24, 2013 at 15:48

Darin Dimitrov

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5 Comments

Andrus Over a year ago

As described in question, customer code can contain /, * , % and other characters which are not allowed as url directory names. In windows kernel.sys immediately returns bad request error for this and does not pass it to IIS. How to use RESTful desing in this case for last API link sample in your answer ?

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

If the customer code can contain such dangerous characters then they do not belong to the path portion of the url. They should be passed used as query string parameters. Leave them as query strings and go with the approach illustrated in my answer or choose a better property to identify your customers than this code.

Andrus Over a year ago

I tried this but search is always null. I updated question. How to fix?

Andrus Over a year ago

I posted this as separate question in stackoverflow.com/questions/20180068/…

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

Apparently you should decorate the model with the [FromUri] attribute. I have updated my answer to reflect that.

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