2015

Web API Deep Dive - Testing with EF Rollbacks across HTTP (part 6 of 6)

.NetWeb API

Microsoft’s ASP.Net Web API 2.2 allows you to easily create REST style APIs on an IIS website. Microsoft has some great documentation on how to get started with it, so I won’t rehash that here. Instead, I’m going to go a little deeper into some powerful features that can be used with Web API.

Overview

A few weeks ago I wrote an article called Cleaning Up EF 6 Tests With Transactions Rollbacks, where I showed how to create integration tests that set up some data in a database, run a test against the data, and then roll back all changes to the data. The rollback was possible because all of the changes to the data were wrapped up inside a transaction.

This posts extends that idea, but instead of a test calling methods on a repository or service layer, this test makes an HTTP call against a Web API endpoint, while preserving the ability to revert all changes to the database as part of a transaction rollback.

The interesting part here is that we will create a database context, start a transaction against that context, create some test data, and then spin up a Web API server that uses that same context. When we’re done with our tests, we’ll roll back the transaction so that the database changes are all reverted.

2016-01-27 Update - clarified when Configuration is available in an API Controller

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Web API Deep Dive - DTO Transformations and Automapper (Part 5 of 6)

Web API

Microsoft’s ASP.Net Web API 2.2 allows you to easily create REST style APIs on an IIS website. Microsoft has some great documentation on how to get started with it, so I won’t rehash that here. Instead, I’m going to go a little deeper into some powerful features that can be used with Web API.

Data Transfer Objects

First, off what is this DTO thing? A Data Transfer Object is an object structure that you use to transfer data across the wire. Sometimes it will look exactly like your entity framework entities. Sometimes it will be different.

For example, suppose you have a database with Customers and Invoices, and your tables look like this: 

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Customer Table
--------------
CustomerId
Name
City
Telephone

Invoice Table
-------------
InvoiceId
CustomerId
Amount

These are also what your Entity models look like, because entity models reflect the database structure.

Now suppose that you want to provide an API endpoint that returns a list of customers in a particular city with the number of invoices for each customer.

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Web API Deep Dive - OData URL Query Options (Part 4 of 6)

Web API

Microsoft’s ASP.Net Web API 2.2 allows you to easily create REST style APIs on an IIS website. Microsoft has some great documentation on how to get started with it, so I won’t rehash that here. Instead, I’m going to go a little deeper into some powerful features that can be used with Web API.

OData URL Query Options

In your API, have you ever created a GET /Orders endpoint, then you discover you need to support paging, so you add an GET /Orders?start={start}&pageSize={pageSize} endpoint? Then you learn another endpoint is needed for sorting by Date, so you also create GET /OrdersByDate and GET /OrdersByDate?start={start}&pageSize={pageSize} endpoints. Before you know it, even though it feels like it should only be a single method, you end up with a collection of endpoints that all do pretty much the same thing except for basic sorting and filtering.

There is an easier way.

Turn on OData URL Query options. To do this, open App_Start\WebApiConfig.cs and add this to the top of the Register method:

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// Allow OData Queries on all methods that return IQueryable
System.Web.Http.OData.Extensions
    .HttpConfigurationExtensions.AddODataQueryFilter(config);

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