ASP.NET Core Web API

Although HTTP was originally designed to request and respond with HTML and other resources for us to look at, it is also good for building services. Roy Fielding stated, in his doctoral dissertation describing the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, that the HTTP standard defines:

• URLs to uniquely identify resources
• Methods to perform common tasks, such as GET and DELETE
• The ability to negotiate media formats such as XML and JSON

To allow the easy creation of services, ASP.NET Core has combined what used to be two types of controller.

In earlier versions of ASP.NET, you would derive from ApiController to create a Web API service, and then register API routes in the same route table that MVC uses.

With ASP.NET Core, you use exactly the same Controller base class used with MVC, except the routes are usually configured on the controller itself, using attributes, rather than in the route table.

Scaffolding an API controller

In the Solution Explorer window...