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Detailed Tutorial for Building ASP.NET WebAPI RESTful

Service
Taiseer Joudeh, 16 Dec 2013

CPOL

5.00 (29 votes)

A sample eLearning system API which follows best practices for building RESTful API using Microsoft technology stack

Source code is available on GitHub

Introduction
When you are designing, implementing, and releasing new REST API, a lot of constraints and standards should be considered;
once the API is available to the public, and clients start consuming it, significant changes are very hard!
There are lot of API designs in the web; but there is no widely adopted design which works for all scenarios, that is why you are
left with many choices and grey areas.
So in this multi-part series, well be building from scratch a sample eLearning system API which follows best practices for
building RESTful API using Microsoft technology stack. Well use Entity framework 6 (Code First) and ASP.NET Web API.
Before digging into code samples and walkthrough, I would like to talk a little bit about the basics and characteristics of RESTful
services and ASP.NET Web API.

Basics of RESTful Services

REST stands for Representational State Transfer, it is a simple stateless architecture that runs over HTTP where each unique URL
is a representation of some resource. There are four basic design principles which should be followed when creating RESTful
service:
Use HTTP methods (verbs) explicitly and in a consistent way to interact with resources (Uniform Interface), i.e., to
retrieve a resource use GET, to create a resource use POST, to update a resource use PUT/PATCH, and to remove a
resource use DELETE.
Interaction with resources is stateless; each request initiated by the client should include within the HTTP headers and
body of the request all the parameters, context, and data needed by the server to generate the response.
Resource identification should be done through URIs, in simple words the interaction between client and resource in the
server should be done using URIs only. Those URIs can act like a service discovery and interface for your RESTful service.
Support JSON or/and XML as the format of the data exchanged in the request/response payload or in the HTTP body.
For more information about RESTful services, you can check this information rich IBM article.

Introducing the ASP.NET Web API

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The ASP.NET Web API shipped with ASP.NET MVC4, it has been around for more than a year and a half. It is considered a
framework for building HTTP services which can be consumed by a broad range of clients such as browsers, smart phones, and
desktop applications. It is not considered as a part of the MVC framework, it is part of the core ASP.NET platform and can be
used in MVC projects, ASP.NET WebForms, or as standalone web service.

ASP.Net Web API Stack

Today, with the increase of using smart phones and the trend of building Single Page Apps (SPA); having a light weight Web API
which exposes your services data to clients is very important. ASP.NET Web API will help you out of the box in creating RESTFul
compliant services using features of HTTP like (URIs, request/response, headers, versioning, and different content formats).

What Well Build in this Multi-part Series?

We need to keep things simple and easy to understand and learn from, but at the same time we need to cover different features
provided by ASP.NET Web API and best practices to build RESTFul service.
Well be building a simple API for eLearning system, this API allows students to enroll in different courses, allows tutors to view
students enrolled in each course, do CRUD operations on courses and students, and many more operations. Ill be listing
detailed use cases which well cover in the next post.
Well discuss and implement different Web API features such as:
Using different routing configuration, controllers, resources association, formatting response, and filters
Implementing Dependency Injection using Ninject
Apply results pagination using different formatting techniques
Implementing complex CRUD operations on multiple resources
Securing Web API by using Basic authentication, forcing SSL
Implementing API Versioning using different techniques (URL versioning, by query string, by version header, and by
accept header)
Implement resources cashing
Note: Well not build a client in this series, well use Fiddler or Postman REST client to compose HTTP requests.
I broke down this series into multiple posts which Ill be posting gradually, posts are:
Building the Database Model using Entity Framework Code First Part 1.
Applying the Repository Pattern for the Data Access Layer Part 2.
Getting started with ASP.Net Web API - Part 3.
Implement Model Factory, Dependency Injection and Configuring Formatters - Part 4.
Implement HTTP actions POST, PUT, and DELETE In Web API - Part 5.
Implement Resources Association - Part 6.
Implement Resources Pagination - Part 7.
Securing Web API Part 8.
Preparing Web API for Versioning Part 9.
Different techniques to Implement Versioning Part 10.
Caching resources using CacheCow and ETag - Part 11.

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Update (2014-March-5) Two new posts which cover ASP.NET Web API 2 new features:
ASP.NET Web API 2 Attribute Routing.
IHttpActionResult as new response type and CORS Support.
All the source code for this series is available on GitHub, you can download it locally or you can fork it. If there is nothing clear or
ambiguous, please drop me a comment and Ill do my best to reply to your questions.
To get the best of this tutorial, I recommend you to follow the posts one by one. Happy coding and hopefully this series will
help you to get started with ASP.NET Web API.

License
This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

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About the Author
Taiseer Joudeh
Architect Aramex
Jordan

Taiseer Joudeh has more than 8 years of experience spent in developing and managing different software solutions for
finance, transportation, logistics, and e-commerce sectors. He has been deeply involved in .NET development since early
framework versions and currently he works on different technologies on the ASP.NET stack with deep passion for Web API,
and Microsoft Azure.
Recently Taiseer has been focusing on building Single Page Applications and Hybrid Mobile Solutions using AngularJS.
Taiseer lives in Jordan with his wife and son, works as IT Manager at Aramex, also he is a regular speaker in local events and
Dev user groups, he is a avid blogger on http://bitoftech.net, and you can follow him on twitter @tjoudeh

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