Question

I’m pretty comfortable with how Asp.NET MVC controllers worked when designing services.
However the new WebAPI controllers. how am I supposed to design my services here?

Lets say we have 3 different ways to list e.g. Users.

Get 10 latest , Get all, Get inactive or whatever.

none of these might need parameters. so how would you solve this in WebAPI

IEnumerable<User> Get10Latest()
IEnumerable<User> GetAll()
IEnumerable<User> GetInactive()

That won’t work since they have the same param signature.
So what is the correct way to design this here?

Answer 1

You can support multiple methods in one controller for a single HTTP method by using the action parameter.
E.g.

public class UsersController : ApiController
{

    [ActionName("All")]
    public HttpResponseMessage GetAll()
    {
        return new HttpResponseMessage();
    }

    [ActionName("MostIQ")]
    public HttpResponseMessage GetMostIQ()
    {
        return new HttpResponseMessage();
    }

    [ActionName("TenLatest")]
    public HttpResponseMessage GetTenLatest()
    {
        return new HttpResponseMessage();
    }

}

Unfortunately, I have not found a way to get a single controller to handle both with and without the action at the same time.

e.g.

public class UsersController : ApiController
{

    [ActionName("")]  // Removing this attribute doesn't help
    public HttpResponseMessage Get()
    {
        return new HttpResponseMessage();
    }

    [ActionName("All")]
    public HttpResponseMessage GetAll()
    {
        return new HttpResponseMessage();
    }

    [ActionName("MostIQ")]
    public HttpResponseMessage GetMostIQ()
    {
        return new HttpResponseMessage();
    }

    [ActionName("TenLatest")]
    public HttpResponseMessage GetTenLatest()
    {
        return new HttpResponseMessage();
    }

}

Being able to use a single controller for a collection resource and all of its subsets would be nice.