Announcement - Nancy.Hal is no longer being maintained! Since NancyFx is no longer being maintained, it doesn't make sense for Nancy.Hal to exist either. Thanks to all who contributed to this project.

Nancy.Hal

Adds lightweight support for the Hal+JSON media type to Nancy

For Nancy 2.0.0-alpha support there is a pre-release package available.

What is Hal?

Specification

What Nancy.Hal does

• Allows Nancy web services to return hal+json formatted responses
• Allows your web services to return plain old JSON/XML representations of your POCOs
• Does not require your models to inherit from any base classes or implement any interfaces
• Uses a fluent declarative syntax to configure the links used to decorate your hypermedia resources
• Works with whatever JSON Serializer you are using with Nancy

What Nancy.Hal does not do

• Handle hal+xml responses
• Deserialize Hal representations back into POCOs (HAL is a serialization format, but says nothing about how to update documents)

Get started

1) Install the Nancy.Hal package

Install-Package Nancy.Hal

2) Create a HalConfiguration instance.

var config = new HalConfiguration();

//simple example - creates a "self" link templated with the user's id
config.For<UserSummary>()
    .Links(model => new Link("self", "/users/{id}").CreateLink(model));

//complex example - creates paging links populated with query string search terms
config.For<PagedList<UserSummary>>()
      .Embeds("users", x => x.Data)
      .Links(
          (model, ctx) =>
          LinkTemplates.Users.GetUsersPaged.CreateLink("self", ctx.Request.Query, new { blah = "123" }))
      .Links(
          (model, ctx) =>
          LinkTemplates.Users.GetUsersPaged.CreateLink("next", ctx.Request.Query, new { page = model.PageNumber + 1 }),
          model => model.PageNumber < model.TotalPages)
      .Links(
          (model, ctx) =>
          LinkTemplates.Users.GetUsersPaged.CreateLink("prev", ctx.Request.Query, new { page = model.PageNumber - 1 }),
          model => model.PageNumber > 0);

//per request configuration
public ExampleModule()
{
    this.Get["/"] = _ => 
    {
        this.Context
            .LocalHalConfigFor<Users>()
            .Links("relation", "/link");

        return 200;
    };
}

3) Register it in your application container.

//TinyIOC
container.Register(typeof(IProvideHalTypeConfiguration), config);

//NInject
kernel.Bind<IProvideHalTypeConfiguration>().ToConstant(config);

4) That's it! Don't forget to set your Accept header to application/hal+json

Acknowledgements

This library could not exist without the work and ideas of others:

• It started as a port of Jake Ginnivan's WebApi.Hal
• ..which in turn is based on the work of Steve Michelotti's hal-media-type
• The fluent configuration idea was lifted from https://github.com/kekekeks/hal-json-net/tree/master/HalJsonNet
• And ideas were borrowed from wis3guy