NServiceMVC

NServiceMVC is archived; essentially ASP.NET WebAPI was released with an extremely similar implementation but much larger ecosystem.

Current releaes is 1.0.1 and can be obtained via NuGet. See the getting started guide for installation and usage instructions.

The idea behind it is to enable the creation of web services (REST to start with, then SOAP later) using the same controller syntax and setup as ASP.NET MVC 3.

This is actually very similar to ASP.NET 4 Web API, but of course NServiceMVC works on MVC 3.

I started building this before knowing that Web API existed, and they surprised me with a release before I even widely published this. It's unclear exactly what will happen with NServiceMVC, but I am continuing to work on it at least until the final release of ASP.NET 4. I suspect at the least NServiceMVC will continue to exist to supplement Web API, and possibly will continue to exist as-is to offer an alternative.

Features

Built on MVC 3
Automatically handles decoding of posted data (from JSON, XML, etc) and automatically encodes result as JSON/XML/XHTML/etc depending on Accept headers or ?format= URL parameter
Provides (optional) automatic metadata (help) generation for all API paths and model types
Attributes are used to configure paths (currently the metadata provider requires this, but the actual API will actually work without attributes, using standard MVC3 routing)
Lightweight. The framework gives you just enough to build a REST service; DI containers, authentication, authorization, caching, logging, etc are up to you to decide and use what you need (or are already using). There are many solutions to all of these problems in the MVC world aleady, it is not the goal of this framework to either dictate or re-implement such functionality.

Todomvc Metadata Page

Show me the code!

An example controller implementation

namespace NServiceMVC.Examples.ComplexApp.Controllers
{
    public class UsersController : NServiceMVC.ServiceController
    {
        [GET("users")] // GET /users
        [Description("List all available users")]
        public List<Models.User> Index()
        {
            return MyServiceLayer.Users.LoadAll();
        }

        [POST("users")] // POST /users
        [Description("Create a new user")]
        public Models.User CreateUser(Models.User user)
        {
            return MyServiceLayer.Users.Create(user);
        }

        [GET("users/{userId}")] // GET /users/123
        [Description("Load a user")]
        public Models.User Detail(int userId)
        {
            return MyServiceLayer.Users.LoadById(userId);
        }

        [PUT("users/{userId}")]  // PUT /users/123
        [Description("Edit an existing user")]
        public bool EditUser(Guid userId, Models.User user)
        {
            user.userId = userId; 
            return MyServiceLayer.Users.Update(user);
        }

        [DELETE("users/{userId}")]  // DELETE /users/123
        [Description("Delete an existing user")]
        public bool EditUser(Guid userId)
        {
            return MyServiceLayer.Users.Delete(userId);
        }
    }
}

WebActivator is used to handle startup, but literally the only other code in the MVC project to make the above work is a call to NServiceMVC.Initialize();. If you want to enable metadata, there is a small amount of configuration (some of this may become automatic/defaults):

NServiceMVC.Initialize(config =>
{
    config.RegisterControllerAssembly(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()); 
    config.RegisterModelAssembly(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(), namespace:"NServiceMVC.Examples.Models"); 
    config.Metadata("metadata"); // serves metadata at /metadata 
});

Todomvc

Also check out the NServiceMVC + Todomvc Example.

Acknowledgements

Just to acknowledge some of the major sources of code used to get started:

Resources over MVC for model binding and format rendering code, and the initial building blocks of using MVC to build REST services
AttributeRouting for ability to specify HTTP verbs and URLs using atributes
ServiceStack for the XHTML versions of model output, and some inspiration in terms of service frameworks
WebActivator used for startup code

Special thanks to JetBrains for providing a TeamCity Continuous Integration server via CodeBetter.com. The builds are available here.

Future Direction

The biggest challenge is the release of ASP.NET 4 Web API. It is likely at the least that this project will build on top of new features introduced there, and either supplement Web API with its metadata generation, SOAP/XML-RPC support (if implemented), or simply offer an alternative implementation.

I have not started work on this yet, but I am thinking of building a shim so that your GET /users/id REST service becomes something like POST /SOAP/GET_users (with id as a parameter) if exposed as SOAP (since SOAP has totally different semantics and limitations than REST). Same thing could be done for XML-RPC.

Lots more can be done with metadata. The beginnings of an auto-generated AJAX test client are there, this can be built out much more deeply. Schema generation (eg WSDL) is also an obvious place to go.

What I do not want to get into is baking-in any cross-cutting concerns (security, logging, caching, etc), and definitely not in the core library. Right now I don't see a need as effectively the service controllers act exactly like normal MVC controllers, and so any existing libraries or code compatible with MVC will work with services implemented on NServiceMVC.

gregmac / NServiceMVC

readme