ASP.NET Web API Architecture Suggestion/Feedback

Question

Currently I am faced with the requirement building an web service that will let a java client retrieve and trigger actions on our data through httprequest. We are a .Net shop it appears the latest solution for this is Microsoft's MVC4 Web API. I am used to your standard tiered architecture I have pulled data from API's but this will be my first web service supplying data.

From my studies I have seen suggestions as follows:

• Separating the logic and data access into a separate project type class library.
• Using your Controls to access data and perform logic.
• Using your Model to access data and perform logic.

I am looking for someone who has experience with MVC4 Web API who can shed some light on good practices for building a web service in this way.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

First of all, do put your ASP.NET Web API logic into a separate project. This will give you flexibility over hosting layer (as ASP.NET Web API is hosting agnostic) and it just makes the whole project clean. Let's say your project's name is MyProject. You can name the API project as MyProject.API and you can install the Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Core NuGet package into this project.

I also suggest you to separate your domain layer as well (POCO entities, repositories, your service layer pieces, etc.). Let's call this MyProject.Domain. Then, you would reference this MyProject.Domain project from the MyProject.APIproject.

I wouldn't recommend you to dump all your POCO entities into your API. So, I would definately work with Data Transfer Objects (Dto). You can use a 3rd party tool like autoMapper to map your entity classes to your Dtos. However, do put your Dtos, Request Commands, Request Models into a separate project. You would reference MyProject.API.Model project from MyProject.API project. Why do we create a separate project for this? Because, later if you decide to build a .NET client wrapper for your HTTP API, you can easily reference this project to use those with your .NET client as well. Let's call this project MyProject.API.Model.

Lastly, we need a hosting layer for our API. Asumming that you would like to host this project under ASP.NET, you can create a new project through the Empty Web Application template and let's call this project MyProject.API.WebHost. Then, you can install the Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi package into this project. From this project, you would reference MyProject.API, MyProject.API.Model and MyProject.Domain projects. This project is the one that you should deploy to your server.

If you would like to create a .NET wrapper for your HTTP API, you can create another project called MyProject.API.Client and install Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Client package into this one. You would also reference the MyProject.API.Model project from this one so that you can deserialize into and serialize from strongly-typed objects.

Here is the screenshot of the solution explorer for the project I have been working with:

Hope this gives you a bit of an idea.