Refining Our Responses

Follow Along

To follow along committing your changes to this course, you'll need to fork the aspnet-fitness-frog-spa repo. Then you can clone, commit, and push your changes to your fork like this:

git clone <your-fork>
cd aspnet-fitness-frog-spa
git checkout tags/v3.4 -b refining-our-responses

JSON POST Data

If you're following along, here's the message body data for making a POST request against the API:

{
  "date": "1/1/2017",
  "activityId": 1,
  "duration": 4.5,
  "intensity": 1,
  "exclude": false,
  "notes": null
}

Refining Responses Using HttpResponseMessage

One option that we can use to refine our responses, is to use HttpResponseMessage for our return type.

public HttpResponseMessage Get()
{
    return _entriesRepository.GetList();
}

Then to create our HttpResponseMessage return value, we can use the Request CreateResponse helper method.

var entries = _entriesRepository.GetList();
return Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, entries);

The CreateResponse method's first parameter gives us a way to specify any of the HTTP status codes defined in the HttpStatusCode enumeration. We can also capture the HttpResponseMessage object into a local variable, which gives us a way to modify any aspect of the response.

var response = Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, entries);
return response;

For example, now we can manipulate the response's headers using any of the properties or methods exposed by the HttpResponseHeaders class.

var response = Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK, entries);
response.Headers.[IntelliSense popup]
return response;

For more information on the HttpResponseMessage class, see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.http.httpresponsemessage(v=vs.118).aspx.

ApiController HttpActionResult Helper Methods

Here's the complete list of HttpActionResult helper methods that you can use to refine your HTTP responses.

• BadRequest —> Returns an HTTP 400 (“Bad Request”)
• Conflict —> Returns an HTTP 409 (“Conflict”)
• Content —> Returns Content (which is automatically negotiated or specified by the developer as media type formatter or content type)
• Created —> Returns an HTTP 201
• InternalServerError —> Returns an HTTP 500 (“Internal Server Error”)
• Json —> Returns an HTTP 200 (“OK”) and provides the content formatted in JSON
• NotFound —> Returns an HTTP 404 (“Not Found”)
• Ok —> Returns an HTTP 200 (“OK”)
• Redirect —> Returns an HTTP 302 (“Found”)
• ResponseMessage —> Returns the provided HttpResponseMessage
• StatusCode —> Returns a response with provided HTTP status code and an empty response body
• Unauthorized —> Returns an HTTP 401 (“Unauthorized”)

Additional Learning

• Microsoft REST API Guidelines
• HttpActionResult Types