Use HTTP Client Factory with NSwag Generated Classes in ASP.NET Core 3

In last week’s post, Using NSwag to Generate C# Client Classes for ASP.NET Core 3, we left off with a usable client, but we were missing out on using some of the features provided by ASP.NET Core such as the HTTP Client Factory and utilizing dependency injection.

Changes to NSwag Client Generation

This post is only going to point out the difference needed to help enable utilization of the ASP.NET Core features mentioned above and won’t be a full walkthrough of using NSwag. If you need a reference for what this post is covering make sure and read last week’s post.

The one change needed from last week’s post is to check Generate interfaces for Client classes.

With the above checked the client class can be regenerated and the files in the consuming application updated.

Using HTTP Client Factory and Dependency Injection

In the consuming application, we need to add the following to line in the ConfigureServices function of the Startup class to add an HTTP Client specifically for our Contacts API and make it available via the dependency injection system.

services.AddHttpClient<IContactsClient, ContactsClient>(client => 
           client.BaseAddress = new Uri("https://localhost:5001"));

For a production application, I would recommend using the configuration system to store the URL for the API instead of hardcoded like it is above.

For example usage, I’m using the IndexModel. First,  add a class-level field to hold our API client and inject the client via the constructor.

private readonly IContactsClient _contactsClient;

public IndexModel(ILogger<IndexModel> logger, IContactsClient contactsClient)
{
    _logger = logger;
    _contactsClient = contactsClient;
}

Now that we have a contacts client at the class-level we can use it get data from our API. The following example uses the client to get all the contacts from the API and stores them in a variable.

public async Task OnGet()
{
    var contacts = await _contactsClient.GetContactsAsync();
}

Wrapping Up

I highly recommend using this style of client vs. using HTTP client directly. If you do some searching you will find that managing the lifetime of HTTP client in .NET before the HTTP client factory was something that is easy to screw up.

The following posted were used as references:

Generating a Typed Client for use with HttpClientFactory using NSwag
How to add generated HttpClient to ASP.NET Core dependency injection

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Also published on Medium.