Create ASP.Net Web API from MS SQL in few clicks with Instant Web API
3 min readImmediate database Web API? Since REST utilizes CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete), it is very easy to understand whether you are just starting out as a developer or have years of experience. It can be reused with different projects which saves time as well. It’s also very popular and according to Cloud Elements’ 2017 State of API Integration report, 83 percent of APIs now use REST. Here’s an article which goes into more depth but these are the highlights.
At the end of the day, the best protocol is the one that makes the most sense for the organization, the types of clients that you need to support, and what you need in terms of flexibility. Most new APIs are built using REST and JSON simply because it typically consumes less bandwidth and is easier to understand both for developers implementing initial APIs as well as other developers who may write other services against it. Because it’s more easily consumed by most of today’s web browsers, REST+JSON has become the defacto technology for the majority of public APIs. However, SOAP remains a valuable protocol in some circumstances. Plus, you don’t have to look far to find die-hard fans advocating for SOAP for certain use cases.
Use Subresources to Show Relationships: An attractive alternative to only using top-level resources is to use subresources to make the relationships between resources more obvious to the API user, and to reduce dependencies on keys inside the resource representation. So how do you decide what resources should be subresources? A rule of thumb is that if the resource is a part of another resource then it should be a subresource (i.e. composition). For example, if you have a customer, an order and an order line then an order line is a part of an order, but an order is not a part of a customer (i.e. the two exists independently and a customer is not made up of orders!) The idea with subresource is to make your API more readable. For example, even if you don’t know the API you can quickly guess that POST /customer/123/orders will create a new order for customer 123. However, if you end up with more than about two levels then the URI starts to become really long and the readability is reduced.
When I ran InstantWebAPI I get an error message about writing rights. How can this be fixed? If you created the stub solution as an administrator, then InstantWebAPI needs to be run as an administrator as well. We have a database with 80 tables. How many tables and views can this software generate the code for? This code was tested against databases with more than 100 tables. Web API project code gets generated pretty fast, but generating Unit Test code it might take a while. We recommend generating the code for a limited number of tables at a time. We have a database with multiple schema. Can the code be generated for all the schemas at the same time? No, this version of the software only allows generating the code for one schema at a time. Further customization can be added by sending a requests to Customer Service. Find additional info at http://instantwebapi.com/.