Question

I have an entity on the server called foo which has a list of bars assigned to it. I want to be able to remove a single bar from the foo.

I don’t however want to update client side and send down the entire foo because the foo is a big object so would be a lot of Json to send up every time if I’m just removing one bar from the foo.

I just want to send down the bar then remove it from the foo entity.

I have my class foo

public class Foo
{
    public Foo()
    {
        Bars = new Collection<Bar>();    
    }

    public ICollection<Bar> Bars { get; set; }
}

I’ve mapped the route

routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "fooBarRoute",
    routeTemplate: "api/foo/{fooId}/bar/{barId}",
    defaults: new { controller = "Bar", action = "RemoveBarFromFoo" }
    );

Sending down the request via javascript (coffeescript)

$.ajax(
url: api/foo/1/bar/1,
data: jsonData,
cache: false,
type: 'XXX',
....

I’m just not sure what route to use, I’ve tried PUT but it doesn’t like it and I’m probably doing it wrong. I’m not really sure what route I should be using in this situation.

public class BarController : ApiController
{
    public void RemoveBarFromFoo(int fooId, Bar bar)
    {    
        // get the foo from the db and then remove the bar from the list and save
    }
}

My question: What route should I be using to achieve this goal? Or if I’m going about this the wrong way what should I be doing?

Thanks, Neil

Answer 1

The HTTP verb that you are using must be DELETE and the action name called Delete in order to follow standard RESTful conventions. Also this action should not take a Bar object as parameter. Only the barId because that’s all that the client sends:

public class BarController : ApiController
{
    public void Delete(int fooId, int barId)
    {    
        // get the foo from the db and then remove the bar from the list and save
    }
}

and you call:

$.ajax({
    url: 'api/foo/1/bar/1',
    type: 'DELETE',
    success: function(result) {

    }
});

and now yuo could remove the action from your route definition because it is the HTTP verb that dictates which action should be invoked:

routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "fooBarRoute",
    routeTemplate: "api/foo/{fooId}/bar/{barId}",
    defaults: new { controller = "Bar" }
);