Book Image

Mastering Minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core

By : Andrea Tosato, Marco Minerva, Emanuele Bartolesi
Book Image

Mastering Minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core

By: Andrea Tosato, Marco Minerva, Emanuele Bartolesi

Overview of this book

The Minimal APIs feature, introduced in .NET 6, is the answer to code complexity and rising dependencies in creating even the simplest of APIs. Minimal APIs facilitate API development using compact code syntax and help you develop web APIs quickly. This practical guide explores Minimal APIs end-to-end and helps you take advantage of its features and benefits for your ASP.NET Core projects. The chapters in this book will help you speed up your development process by writing less code and maintaining fewer files using Minimal APIs. You’ll also learn how to enable Swagger for API documentation along with CORS and handle application errors. The book even promotes ideas to structure your code in a better way using the dependency injection library in .NET. Finally, you'll learn about performance and benchmarking improvements for your apps. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to fully leverage new features in .NET 6 for API development and explore how Minimal APIs are an evolution over classical web API development in ASP.NET Core.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction
5
Part 2: What’s New in .NET 6?
10
Part 3: Advanced Development and Microservices Concepts

Mapping data to and from APIs

When dealing with APIs that can be called by any system, there is one golden rule: we should never expose our internal objects to the callers. If we don’t follow this decoupling idea and, for some reason, need to change our internal data structures, we could end up breaking all the clients that interact with us. Both the internal data structures and the objects that are used to dialog with the clients must be able to evolve independently from one another.

This requirement for dialog is the reason why mapping is so important. We need to transform input objects of one type into output objects of a different type and vice versa. In this way, we can achieve two objectives:

  • Evolve our internal data structures without introducing breaking changes with the contracts that are exposed to the callers
  • Modify the format of the objects used to communicate with the clients without the need to change the way these objects are handled internally...