JSON:API

Introduction It has been over a year since I last wrote about JSON:API, since then the team behind JSON:API has published version 1.1 of the JSON:API specification. I would like to continue my journey of documenting JOSN:API in .NET by introducing a really cool feature to my Chinook JSON:API project, filtering. The first thing to know about filtering in JSON:API is that the spec itself is agnostic to any filtering strategies. Meaning it is up to you to define how filtering should be handled by your API. In my opinion, this has always been a drawback of the JSON:API spec, I believe in that it would have been a better choice for the spec if it had decided on a filtering strategy, but that is discussion for another day. While the spec does not favor any filtering strategy it does have some recommendations. ...

It has been a while since I blogged about JSON:API. In my last post on JSON:API I covered how to create new resources. In today’s post, I want to go over how I expose pagination links. Pagination links allow a client to page through a collection of resources. A shift of control from the client back to the server. Here is an example of a possible JSON:API response that includes pagination links. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 { "data": [ { // omitted for brevity } ], "links": { "up": "http://example.com/", "self": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=3&page[size]=1", "first": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=1&page[size]=1", "prev": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=2&page[size]=1", "next": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=4&page[size]=1", "last": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=13&page[size]=1" } } As you can see, along with the data object, the API responses included a Links object, within the Links object, you can find links for up, self, first, prev, next, and last. These are all relationship name as defined in Link Relations by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). ...

So far in my JSON:API series I’ve covered the home resource, adding your own resource, adding an exception handling middleware and how to expose relationship between resources. For the today’s post, I would like to cover creating resources. I will update the chinook project by allowing POST request on the customers collections to add new customers. To get started, the customer controller needs to have a method that will accept the incoming POST request. I’ve decided to call the method CreateCustomerResource, the method will accept a JSON:API document from the request body. The full method signature is defined below. ...

This will be my third blog post on JSON:API in .NET Core. I plant to add Customer as an API resource, but before we get too deep on the code, I would like to review the Chinook database project. To do that I’m going to import Chinook.db into DB Browser for SQLite to see all available entities. As you can see we have quite a few entities, for this blog post I will concentrate on the customers entity. To accomplish adding customers as an API resource I will need to create a new service model that represents the customers entity in both JsonApiFramework and EF Core. I will scaffold the SQLite database using EF Core’s reverse engineering capabilities. ...

On my second post on JSON:API in .NET Core I wanted to create an exception handling middleware. This middleware would be responsible for catching all exceptions and for generating a JSON:API Errors Documents. I’ll start by adding a middleware folder on the Chinook.Web project, for now it will only have the exception handling middleware, but, eventually it will have additional middleware. Folder has been added, now I will add the middleware class to the project in here. ...