This week’s post is going to cover the creation of an API controller. The starting point for this post is based on this post from last week and the starting state of the code can be found here.
Scaffolding
Using the same Contact model class from last week’s post Entity Framework Core’s scaffolding can be used to generate an API controller for us with all the read and write actions already written. To begin in the Solution Explorer window right click on the Controllers folder and select Add > New Scaffolded Item.
On the Add Scaffold dialog select API Controller with actions, using Entity Framework. This option will create an API controller with read and write actions based on a model.
On the Add Controller dialog for the model class select the Contact class, for the data context class select the existing ContactsContext. Finally enter the controller name you would like to use. I am using ContactsApiController since the MVC controller from last week’s post is already named ContactsController.
Click add and the scaffolding process will create a ContactsApiController in the Controllers folder. With that the project now contains a fully functional contacts API that will handle gets, puts, posts and deletes with zero code changes.
Test with Postman
Postman is a great tool that I always use when developing an API that allows me to exercise all the functions of the API before any clients have been built. I know you can do some of the same things using a browser, but Postman was built for this type of usage and it shows. Postman is free and you can grab it from here as a Chrome app or they have app versions available here.
After installing the application and running it you will see something like the following.
It is best to have some data available for testing so in the case of this application I recommend using the UI added in last weeks post to add a couple of contacts.
Now that some data is available it is time to test the GetContact function on the ContactsApiController. If you run the application it should open in a browser from which you can copy the URL, or right click on the project select properties then on the Debug tab copy the URL from the App URL field.
Paste the base URL in the URL box in Postman and then add on the route for the endpoint you are wanting to test. In this case I want to test the the GetContact function on the ContactsApiController so I will be using the a URL of http://localhost:13322/api/contactsapi. Next make sure contact application is running and then click the send button in Postman. The application should respond and the results of the API call will be displayed on the body tab of Postman.
Postman can be used to try out pretty much all aspects of the API that an application has. For example if you wanted to test out the PostContact then in Postman click the down arrow next to Get and select Post. Next select the upper body tab (in the request area) and the click the raw radio button. Then to the right of the radio buttons hit the down arrow and select JSON (application/json) and then it the large text box you can enter the JSON that will be sent to the server when you click the send button. The following is an example of a post request.
Wrapping Up
This application now has a fully functional API and we have covered how test it using Postman.
The next step would be to create some sort of client to actually utilized the API such as an Aurelia or Angular 2 application.
The code for this post can be found here.