LiteApi

LiteApi is an ApiController that simplifies creating RESTfulish apis. It helps service designer to use ASP.NET WebApi for writing message based services. It inspired by ServiceStack's AutoQuery.

Caution: This project is in early stages of development.

How to use

To use LiteApi, you must define 3 types and then inherit your controller from LiteApiController. These types are:

1. Dto
2. Entity
3. QueryDescriptor

All of these types can be simple classes and no need to inherit them from specific classes. LiteApiController maps Entity to Dto with AutoMapper. Users of controller see Dto but LiteApiController works with entity when it needs to work with persistence layer.

QueryDescriptor defines how users of controller can query collection of entity.

###Example:

Suppose that your entity is:

public class Person
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public string LastName { get; set; }
        public bool IsAdmin { get; set; }
}

And your Dto is:

public class PersonDto
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public string LastName { get; set; }
    }

And your QueryDesriptor is:

public class PersonDtoQueryDescriptor
    {
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public int? Id_Gt { get; set; }
        public int? Id_Ge { get; set; }
        public int? Id_Lt { get; set; }
        public int? Id_Le { get; set; }
        public int? Id_Ne { get; set; }
        public string[] OrderBy { get; set; }
        public string[] OrderByDesc { get; set; }
        public int? Take { get; set; }
        public int? Skip { get; set; }
    }

You just need to define your ApiController as:

public class PersonController : LiteApiController<int, PersonDto, Person, PersonDtoQueryDescriptor>
    {
        public PersonController()
            : base(new InMemoryCollectionPersistenceService<Person>(Person.Seed()))
        { }
        public PersonController(IPersistenceService collection)
            : base(collection)
        { }
    }

Note: InMemoryCollectionPersistenceService<Person> is an implementation of IPersistenceService that connects your api to your DAO class. You can write your own IPersistenceService. There is an implementation for ICollection<T> and NHibernate PersistenceService implemented out of the box.

After that you can work with your api:

Request	Meaning
GET http://localhost/api/Person/1	Get Person with Id = 1
GET http://localhost/api/Person?Take=10&Skip=2	Get 2nd 10 Persons
GET http://localhost/api/Person?Id_Gt=3	Get Persons with Id Greater Than 3