Creating a web service for the Northwind database

Unlike MVC controllers, Web API controllers do not call Razor views to return HTML responses for website visitors to see in browsers. Instead, they use content negotiation with the client application that made the HTTP request to return data in formats such as XML, JSON, or X-WWW-FORM-URLENCODED in their HTTP response, which looks like the following:

firstName=Mark&lastName=Price&jobtitle=Author

The client application must then deserialize the data from the negotiated format. The most used format for modern web services is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) because it is compact and works natively with JavaScript in a browser when building Single-Page Applications (SPAs) with client-side technologies like Angular, React, and Vue.

We will reference the Entity Framework Core entity data model for the Northwind database that you created in Chapter 12, Introducing Web Development Using ASP.NET Core:

1. In the...