Tag: API

I am developing a RESTful API using .NET technology to implement the service.

The part that I am having problems with is the dynamic nature of the representation types that the service will return.

For example, let’s say I have a Person model, and the Person has a bunch of Beyblades toys they can battle other people with.

My model would look something like:

public class Person{
  public guid ID {get; set;}
  public string Name {get; set;}
  public List<Beyblades> Beyblades{get; set;}
  //...
}

The API will return a list of People by going to “urlpeople”. The representation for the people returned will contain the person’s ID, name, and a link to “urlbeybladesperson-ID” that can be followed instead of the serialized list of their Beyblades (if they have any).

Seems pretty straightforward, but the implementation of a dynamically generating links for lists-of-things (and not the list’s themselves) is what I’m trying to find the best solution for.

My initial thought was to create templates for the representations returned. The template would check the model in order to output the correct representation data. For example, the template would check if the person has any Beyblades, and if so it would generate the link (instead of the serialized list of Beyblade models); likewise, it would generate a self link for each person as well.

The problem with this solution is that if my API is to support JSON (Hal), XML, and say HTML as possible representation output types, I would have to manage at least 3 templates whenever something in the model were changed.

My next thought is to design a serialization framework by implementing a series of MediaTypeFormatter types that would naturally consider my business logic to convert lists into appropriate links; however, this too could become problematic while maintaining the API since there would have to be some sort of standard mapping between lists of things and API URLs and this may not be apparent when changes are made.

Since REST is not a new thing, I was wondering if .NET already has tools for serializing models into a RESTful representations?

Or if there was a best practices document/tutorial on this topic?

Or maybe I’m conceptually going about this wrong and someone here could point me in the right direction?

I realize that REST and OO doesn’t seem go hand-in-hand, so maybe there isn’t anything like what I am seeking. It just feels like I’m inventing a wheel that someone has probably already done.