Web API makes it in Orchard
Web API has been released publicly, and obviously Orchard now supports it with great help from Nicholas Mayne who made the first implementation. The question is what does it mean for Orchard to support Web API ? If you don't know what Web API is you can get some more information on the official website.
ASP.NET Web API is a framework that makes it easy to build HTTP services that reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices. ASP.NET Web API is an ideal platform for building RESTful applications on the .NET Framework.
Integrating Web API in Orchard means being able to expose Web API services as modules, and also reuse existing Orchard's components within Web API controllers, using dependency injection. We also needed to integrate it with multi-tenancy in mind.
Creating a Web API Controller
A Web API controller will work in the same way as MVC ones do. It will be responsible for implementing specific actions, which themselves will handle the requests from the client. Creating a Web API controller in Orchard is not different than creating on in any other ASP.NET MVC application, just add the class to you project, preferably in a Controllers folder.
public class HelloController : ApiController {
public HelloController(
IOrchardServices orchardServices) {
Services = orchardServices;
T = NullLocalizer.Instance;
}
public IOrchardServices Services { get; private set; }
public Localizer T { get; set; }
public string Get() {
return "Hello, world!";
}
}
In this specific example we also inject some services that Orchard is exposing. Nothing different than a standard MVC controller in Orchard. To request this specific controller though there is a default route which is created automatically by Orchard.
/api/{Module_Name|Module_Id}/{Controller}/{id}
For isntance, if the earlier controller had been added to a module called Orchard.MyModule, the default url targetting this controller would be
/api/Orchard.MyModule/Hello
The {id} part of the route is optional, and will map to an id parameter of the controller's actions if any. Also, if you have defined a your module's manifest, then you should use it instead of the module id.
Registering a custom route
The default route pattern might now suit your needs. Like for MVC controllers Orchard exposes some extension points to declarer custom routes.
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Orchard.Mvc.Routes;
using Orchard.WebApi.Routes;
public class HttpRoutes : IHttpRouteProvider {
public void GetRoutes(ICollection<RouteDescriptor> routes) {
foreach (RouteDescriptor routeDescriptor in GetRoutes()) {
routes.Add(routeDescriptor);
}
}
public IEnumerable<RouteDescriptor> GetRoutes() {
return new[] {
new HttpRouteDescriptor {
Name = "HelloApi",
Priority = -10,
RouteTemplate = "HelloApi",
Defaults = new {
area = "Orchard.MyModule",
controller = "Hello"
},
}
};
}
}
Using this custom route provider we an target the controller with this url:
/HelloApi
Conclusion
Web API should give you new opportunities to expose your Orchard websites to external applications or to add more dynamic behaviors within your module. An interesting scenario for this would be to expose the Content Manager as an external service using the [Queryable] attribute from OData. Read this blog post for more details.
I've been using Orchard for a few weeks, and whilst I found it initially a bit puzzling, I'm getting up to speed, and I'm really enjoying using it.
What's more, it's posts like this that demonstrate that its pace of development is right up there, and there are exciting times ahead.
Thanks for your work!
Okay, so I have went through this process, after pulling down a recent build with HG, and cannot find "Orchard.WebApi.Routes" which makes me think that I don't have the correct pull of the source. I might have the correct source drop, but ReSharper doesn't recognize this namespace. What am I missing here? Am I just not on the correct drop? The source is from September 1, 2012.
I'v downloaded latest version of orchard.But there is no 'Orchard.WebApi' to use in routes.Any idea?
I followed your instructions but after adding the route, i was unable to access the controller through my browser.
should I type :
http://localhost:30320/api/HelloApi
or
http://localhost:30320/OrchardLocal/api/HelloApi
? because neither of them works.
should this work in my browser?
how can I access the controller through an external service?
I followed your instructions but after adding the route, i was unable to access the controller through my browser.
should I type :
http://localhost:30320/api/HelloApi
or
http://localhost:30320/OrchardLocal/api/HelloApi
? because neither of them works.
should this work in my browser?
how can I access the controller through an external service?
Thanks for the tips Sebastien,
here is a link of a module that includes the latest OData libraries and simplifies the process of returning OData objects from Orchard. The documentation describes how to serialize and return Blogparts.
http://orchardodata.codeplex.com/
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Will you be able to implement an entire cms through the web api or just things like content?
What changes now in this 1.8 version?
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