WebApi Help Page Description

Question

What populates the Webapi method's description on the helper page and the introduction paragraph?

Answer 1

To view the description you need to follow this :

1. Every action in your Customer controller must have a XML documentation
2. Open the properties of the project that contains your controllers and enable XML documenation like this :

3. In the Register method for HelpPageConfig class ( Areas/HelpPage/App_Start/HelpPageConfig.cs) uncomment the line 19 and don't forget to change the file path like this :

   config.SetDocumentationProvider(new XmlDocumentationProvider(     HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/MvcApplication4.XML")) ); 

This all you must do. Last thing is to include the file created in App_Data in your project so the file will be deployed in production.

Answer 2

According to this article you can use XML documentation comments to create the documentation. To enable this feature, open the file Areas/HelpPage/App_Start/HelpPageConfig.cs and uncomment the following line:

config.SetDocumentationProvider(new XmlDocumentationProvider(     HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/XmlDocument.xml"))); 

Now enable XML documentation. In Solution Explorer, right-click the project and select Properties. Select the Build page.

Under Output, check XML documentation file. In the edit box, type “App_Data/XmlDocument.xml”.

Add some documentation comments to the controller methods. For example:

/// <summary> /// Gets some very important data from the server. /// </summary> public IEnumerable<string> Get() {     return new string[] { "value1", "value2" }; }  /// <summary> /// Looks up some data by ID. /// </summary> /// <param name="id">The ID of the data.</param> public string Get(int id) {     return "value"; }