Question

I’m writing a http API, and I need a bit more flexibility than I’m used to in asp.net. It’s pretty simple problem I have, and just need some help getting on the right track.

My problem is, that I want to create a response object based on the request. F.x a user can get a xml document when requesting: “myapi/images/5/xml”. Or get it as a json if it had ended with json. I have no problems creating the right response objects. I just need a way to collect all the request in some object, then parse the URL with a regex and create the right response on that.

But how do I collect all requests on a web application?

Answer 1

You probably don’t want to parse the whole URL with a regex. It’d probably be easier to hook into ASP.NET’s routing engine:-

routes.MapHttpRoute(
  name: "MyApi",
  routeTemplate: "myapi/{controller}/{id}/{responseType}",
  defaults: new
  {
    id = RouteParameter.Optional, responseType = RouteParameter.Optional
  });

Then your action method can accept a parameter responseType from the url.

I agree with steven’s comment above, though, you should probably get the response type from the request header rather than from the url.