Posts

I am currently building a JSON:API driven API on .NET 5, the project is called Chinook after the Sqlite Chinook project. The API is mature enough for me to introduce filtering via the Filter query parameter used in JSON:API. I would like to support dynamic filtering, I want to avoid creating nested if-else/switch statements that check if a given input is part of the filter criteria, and if it is then it gets appended to a filtering clause. For example, take the following API request, it uses the OData filter syntax. ...

When I first started to learn about GraphQL I was somewhat surprise to learn that the GraphQL specification did not provide any guidance or spoke of any methods to handle asynchronous request. By asynchronous request, I mean request that cannot be completed within your normal request-response context. For example, take an API that aggregates orders by combining various types of filters, the API may allow you to filter by only orders that are greater than $100.00, or orders placed in certain date range, or orders that have a particular product and so on. Depending on the amount of data and filters used, the query to get the data may take a couple of minutes, maybe even hours. The question now becomes how to best handle long-running request in GraphQL. ...

My Chinook JSON:API project is now in a good enough state that I feel comfortable hosting it on a live server. Here is the base url, https://chinook-jsonapi.herokuapp.com/, I highly recommend using some kind of JSON viewer if you want to interact with the API. If you are on a Chromium base browser then I recommend using JSON Viewer. Remember, the API does not support filtering, pagination, sorting or include resolvers and it only supports READ operations. I’m hoping to add filtering soon but I first want to dedicate a blog post or two on building dynamic LINQ queries using expression trees. That should be fun! ...

.NET Core 2.2 introduce a small feature known as Query Tags. It allows you to annotate queries generated by EF Core. This is super useful for debugging purposes, after all one of the main complains you often hear about EntityFramework is the over completed SQL statements it generates. I am currently working on a project called Chinook, it demonstrates how to build a JSON:API on .NET Core. The project uses EF Core to query a SQLite database. Here is an example of one of the LINQ queries used to get a collection of users. ...

My previous post on JSON:API exposed customers as an API resource, since then, I have updated the project to expose all remaining resources, that includes Albums, Artists, Employees, Genres, Invoices, InvoiceItems, MediaTypes, Playlists, and Tracks. The time has come to expose the relationship that exist between these resource. For this post, I will expose the one-to-many relationship that exist between artists and albums. To accomplish this task I will have to update the class ArtistServiceModelConfiguration by using the ToManyRelationship method exposed by JsonApiFramework in order to link one artist to many albums. ...