Tagged articles - REST

Shifting from traditional monolithic application architecture to micorservices can solve bunch of problems and issues monolith application application design approach introduces, but on the other hand it has it's own drawbacks, although number of drawbacks compared to number of problems it solves is a lot greater so it makes sense to take a path in process of moving from monolithic to micorservices. On of the steps to move to micorservices is to physically have your services running as individual processes...read more

Generating client libraries for REST API which are documented with Swagger can significantly reduce product development time, especially on the front-end side. Well documented API can be easily interpreted by various tools to generate language specific libraries which can be then just easily integrated in in the API service consuming application. Some time ago I wrote an article Stop writing clients in C# for your Web APIs which explains how to use NSwag to generate NuGet packages for Swagger documented Web API REST services and to push them to Azure DevOps Artifact Feed...read more

While designing the REST API, quite often you may find yourself in a situation where the data can be provided from multiple sources, like route, query string or POST/PUT payload. While that might not be a big problem, it may force you to redesign your models and most likely you will end up with keeping your original DTOs but then designing a new model in your application services layer just to have all your data from different sources in one place when you are passing it to the service method. Resolving multiple sources custom binding ...read more

Patterns, conventions and standards are invented and enforced in order to make coding easier and more understandable for the developers, but in some cases certain patterns and conventions do not couple so easily and you have to rely on more on the actual technology you are using in order to overcome these complications. One of the cases this happens is using CQRS, especially commands and REST...read more

Times of writing your HttpClient setup to call REST API endpoint are over. It is just to much of repetitive code and taking care of the endpoints of the REST API service...read more

Since REST services do not have the UI, there is not much space for the localization. Data is sent and retrieved and most of the decisions is made based on the status code of the response...read more

Swagger is a great way to document you REST API endpoints and reduce the need for communication, item spent and the cost for supporting the consumers of you APIs. Apart from providing the info about the endpoints, models, validation it can also display the data of the product...read more

Contracts, models or DTOs, call them how ever you want, are your connection with the outside world from your REST API. Consumers of your API depend on them and they know what to expect or what your API endpoints expect in communication...read more

Implementing partial updates on the REST API is probably the trickiest method to implement. Unlike PUT HTTP method where you pass the whole DTO when you are updating an entity, PATCH method is intended to update only one or few properties of the entity you want to apply change to...read more

Paging a REST API response is equally important as filtering the data returned through REST API endpoints and they quite often come together. Just like filtering, paging limits the amount of data returned from the endpoint, saving both client and server side resources...read more

Starting from .NET Core version 2.1, there are so far three types of WebApi responses that controller actions can return. All three types had it's own pros and cons but all are lacking in options to satisfy both REST and the high level of testability. The available response types in ASP.NET Core including recently released 2.2 version are ...read more

Some time ago I wrote an article about ASP.NET Core Web API versioning which describes route based Web API endpoint versioning. I love route versioning and to me it is the best way of versioning because it is pretty straight, but there are situations where this kind of versioning is not suitable. On nuget.org you can find Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Versioning package which gives you more options on how you can version your Web API endpoints...read more

Azure as a part of Microsoft Operations Management Suite provides data collection and insight services inside Azure cloud platform. It allows you to: ...read more

Taking out business logic from the application allows different clients running on a different platform to use same logic. REST API is a great way to decuple business logic and make it available to different clients on a different platforms. To upload files using WebApi we first need to define an action in a WebApi controller to handle files posted to the endpoint. ...read more

Today there are multiple URL shortening solution available online for free. However, there is always need to have some existing funtionalities in the house for various reasons...read more