In my previous article, I have explained about the what is RESTful service and the constraints involved. Now let us see how the ASP.Net Web API satisfies those constraints.
Client-server constraint is an easy one to satisfy out of the box. ASP.NET Web API is all about responding to the client request with the data, without bothering about client state or how data will be presented to the end user.
Stateless constraint can also be easily satisfied out of the box, unless something horrible is done such as using the ASP.NET session state from the web API. ASP.NET MVC supports the OutputCache attribute that can be used to control output caching. ASP.NET Web API has no support out of the box, but it is easy to roll out our own action filter attribute. The bottom line is that the Cache-Control response header is the lever ASP.NET Web API can use to label a response as cacheable or not. By default, Cache-Control is set to no-cache and the response is not cached.
Layered constraint is more along the infrastructure line—proxies, firewalls, and so on. There is nothing special that needs to be done from ASP.NET Web API to satisfy this constraint.
Uniform interface constraint includes the following four constraints and is a key factor in deciding if an HTTP service is RESTful or not.
Client-server constraint is an easy one to satisfy out of the box. ASP.NET Web API is all about responding to the client request with the data, without bothering about client state or how data will be presented to the end user.
Stateless constraint can also be easily satisfied out of the box, unless something horrible is done such as using the ASP.NET session state from the web API. ASP.NET MVC supports the OutputCache attribute that can be used to control output caching. ASP.NET Web API has no support out of the box, but it is easy to roll out our own action filter attribute. The bottom line is that the Cache-Control response header is the lever ASP.NET Web API can use to label a response as cacheable or not. By default, Cache-Control is set to no-cache and the response is not cached.
Layered constraint is more along the infrastructure line—proxies, firewalls, and so on. There is nothing special that needs to be done from ASP.NET Web API to satisfy this constraint.
Uniform interface constraint includes the following four constraints and is a key factor in deciding if an HTTP service is RESTful or not.
- Identification of resources
- Manipulation of resources through representations
- Self-descriptive messages
- Hypermedia as the engine of application state (HATEOAS)