How to mange API endpoints? - .net-core

Question

Configured the HttpClient in the startup.cs.
services.AddHttpClient("jsonPosts", client => {
client.BaseAddress = new Uri("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/");
On the Controller calling API:
// Obtaining _clientFactory by DI on the Controller constructor
var client = _clientFactory.CreateClient("jsonPosts");
var myContent = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(myObjectToSerialize);
HttpContent stringContent = new StringContent(myContent, Encoding.UTF8, "application/json");
HttpResponseMessage result = await client
.PostAsync(client.BaseAddress + "posts/1", stringContent)
.ConfigureAwait(false);
You can can see on the PostAsync method the API endpoint is being appended to the base address of the HttpClient.
Is this the recommended approach of managing different endpoints across an application?

Answer 1

Well, that depends on your application.
If you only have to do few things like authenticate, post something, exit application then there´s no reason to do the work and create a structure thatfor.
If you do multiple calls and especially want to do the same call at different points in your code you should create an api wrapper.
A common way is to create one generic method that takes an Type as generic argument, also give it the url, HTTP method and other data you might need.
The method will do the call with the arguments given, automatically Deserialize the JSON to an Object of the generic type and return it to you.
This way you can do something like this with only having to write one method and define classes for the Results. You might even use dynamics without defining classes but I personally don´t like dynamics.
ApiClient api = new ApiClient(baseUrl);
User user = api.get<User>("/user", new Query().add("user", "admin"));
EmailList emails = api.get<EmailList>("/user/emails");
Then you could still populate it into multiple methods if you don´t want to mess with the endpoints like
public User getUser(String username){
User user = api.get<User>("/user", new Query().add("user", "admin"));
return user;
}
And use it like
MyApiWrapper.getUser("admin");