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Getting Started with ASP.NET Core

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API Controllers

3:16 with James Churchill

Web API has been merged into MVC. Let's look at an example of an API controller to understand the impact of this change.

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    The big change of API controllers from the previous versions of MVC and 0:00
    Web API is that they are no longer separate products. 0:04
    Web API has been merged into MVC. 0:08
    This means that MVC and API controllers now share the same base class. 0:12
    This convergence makes it much easier to share your code between your MVC and 0:18
    API controllers. 0:23
    For instance, a single custom filter can now be used for 0:25
    both MVC and API controllers. 0:28
    Even though it's possible for 0:32
    a controller to contain action methods that return view content or API content. 0:33
    I still like to separate my API action methods into their own controllers. 0:39
    I think this makes your projects easier to navigate 0:44
    by making your code more discoverable. 0:47
    Here's an example of a simple API controller. 0:50
    Notice that we can use the controller token in the route attribute template. 0:53
    The controller token will get updated with our controller class name minus 0:59
    the controller suffix. 1:04
    This makes it easier to keep the class name in sync with the route template. 1:05
    If we were ever to change the name of our controller class. 1:09
    Our action method names no longer implicitly influence or 1:15
    affect the list of allowed HTTP verbs. 1:19
    So we now need to be explicit with the verbs that our action 1:23
    methods should respond to by using the appropriate HTTP verb attributes. 1:26
    The last thing to note here is that we can now provide the route template 1:32
    directly in the HTTP verb attribute. 1:36
    This is a nice improvement to help make our code more concise. 1:39
    Let's start our app and use Postman to test our API. 1:43
    Here's the response from our API. 2:02
    Notice that our property names are camelcased. 2:05
    Instead of starting with a capital letter like our actual model property names. 2:07
    This is the new default behavior for ASP.NET core. 2:12
    If you're developing a new app, you just need to remember to use the correct 2:16
    property names in your client side code. 2:20
    If you're migrating an app from the previous version of Web API, 2:23
    this change might break your client side code. 2:26
    In our Startup class, we can configure the MVC JSON options. 2:41
    So that our model property names are not changed when rendering a JSON response. 2:45
    This code is getting the JSON DefaultContractResolver and 2:54
    then removing the camelcasing naming strategy. 2:58
    If we start our app again and make another GET request. 3:02
    We can now see that our model property names are being preserved. 3:05

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