WebAPI service design - asp.net

Question

I'm pretty comfortable with how Asp.NET MVC controllers worked when designing services.
However the new WebAPI controllers. how am I supposed to design my services here?
Lets say we have 3 different ways to list e.g. Users.
Get 10 latest , Get all, Get inactive or whatever.
none of these might need parameters. so how would you solve this in WebAPI
IEnumerable<User> Get10Latest()
IEnumerable<User> GetAll()
IEnumerable<User> GetInactive()
That won't work since they have the same param signature.
So what is the correct way to design this here?

Answer 1

You can support multiple methods in one controller for a single HTTP method by using the action parameter.
E.g.
public class UsersController : ApiController
{
[ActionName("All")]
public HttpResponseMessage GetAll()
{
return new HttpResponseMessage();
}
[ActionName("MostIQ")]
public HttpResponseMessage GetMostIQ()
{
return new HttpResponseMessage();
}
[ActionName("TenLatest")]
public HttpResponseMessage GetTenLatest()
{
return new HttpResponseMessage();
}
}
Unfortunately, I have not found a way to get a single controller to handle both with and without the action at the same time.
e.g.
public class UsersController : ApiController
{
[ActionName("")] // Removing this attribute doesn't help
public HttpResponseMessage Get()
{
return new HttpResponseMessage();
}
[ActionName("All")]
public HttpResponseMessage GetAll()
{
return new HttpResponseMessage();
}
[ActionName("MostIQ")]
public HttpResponseMessage GetMostIQ()
{
return new HttpResponseMessage();
}
[ActionName("TenLatest")]
public HttpResponseMessage GetTenLatest()
{
return new HttpResponseMessage();
}
}
Being able to use a single controller for a collection resource and all of its subsets would be nice.

Answer 2

Someone will probably be along and wrap me on the knuckles for this, but you need to configure your routing to handle the Gets. This is how I got it working with the above operations:
config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
name: "CustomApi",
routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}",
defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
);
So now your requests are mapped to the correct controller -> action via the route template. Note that the new route needs to be registered first in WebApiConfig.cs. If you keep the old, default one.
EDIT
Having re-read the question I realize I wasn't quite answering the design question. I would think that one way to go about it, from a REST perspective, would be to use a separate resource to expose the proper collections (Get10Latest for example) since I assume that there is a business reason for exposing that exact subset of data through the service. In that case you'd expose that resource though a single Get in its own Controller (if that is the desired behaviour).

Answer 3

Well why not have urls like this:
GET /users
GET /users/latest
GET /users/inactive
Using routing you could route them to
public classs UserController : ApiController
{
public IEnumerable<User> Get(string mode)
{
// mode is in routing restricted to be either empty, latest, or inactive
}
}
Otherwise use multiple controllers. The use of action names in Web API is kind of a wrong way to about it.