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up vote 21 down vote favorite
4

I'm converting from the WCF Web API to the new ASP.NET MVC 4 Web API. I have a UsersController, and I want to have a method named Authenticate. I see examples of how to do GetAll, GetOne, Post, and Delete, however what if I want to add extra methods into these services? For instance, my UsersService should have a method called Authenticate where they pass in a username and password, however it doesn't work.

public class UsersController : BaseApiController
{
    public string GetAll()
    {
        return "getall!";
    }

    public string Get(int id)
    {
        return "get 1! " + id;
    }

    public User GetAuthenticate(string userName, string password, string applicationName)
    {
        LogWriter.Write(String.Format("Received authenticate request for username {0} and password {1} and application {2}",
            userName, password, applicationName));

        //check if valid leapfrog login.
        var decodedUsername = userName.Replace("%40", "@");
        var encodedPassword = password.Length > 0 ? Utility.HashString(password) : String.Empty;
        var leapFrogUsers = LeapFrogUserData.FindAll(decodedUsername, encodedPassword);

        if (leapFrogUsers.Count > 0)
        {
            return new User
            {
                Id = (uint)leapFrogUsers[0].Id,
                Guid = leapFrogUsers[0].Guid
            };
        }
        else
            throw new HttpResponseException("Invalid login credentials");
    }
}

I can browse to myapi/api/users/ and it will call GetAll and I can browse to myapi/api/users/1 and it will call Get, however if I call myapi/api/users/authenticate?username={0}&password={1} then it will call Get (NOT Authenticate) and error:

The parameters dictionary contains a null entry for parameter 'id' of non-nullable type 'System.Int32' for method 'System.String Get(Int32)' in 'Navtrak.Services.WCF.NavtrakAPI.Controllers.UsersController'. An optional parameter must be a reference type, a nullable type, or be declared as an optional parameter.

How can I call custom method names such as Authenticate?

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3 Answers

up vote 25 down vote accepted

By default the route configuration follows RESTFul conventions meaning that it will accept only the Get, Post, Put and Delete action names (look at the route in global.asax => by default it doesn't allow you to specify any action name => it uses the HTTP verb to dispatch). So when you send a GET request to /api/users/authenticate you are basically calling the Get(int id) action and passing id=authenticate which obviously crashes because your Get action expects an integer.

If you want to have different action names than the standard ones you could modify your route definition in global.asax:

routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "DefaultApi",
    routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
    defaults: new { action = "get", id = RouteParameter.Optional }
);

Now you can navigate to /api/values/getauthenticate to authenticate the user.

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Works great, thanks! – Justin Mar 5 '12 at 15:45
6  
Is there a way to get it to still use Get(id), Get() Put, Delete, Post while still allowing other actions? – Shawn Mclean Mar 28 '12 at 1:55
@ShawnMclean I guess that you could specify another route without {action} that has a constraint on {id} so that anything other than int or Guid (or whatever) wouldn't match. Then it should be able to fall through to the one suggested by Darin – Steve Greatrex Oct 12 '12 at 16:25
up vote 18 down vote

This is the best method I have come up with so far to incorporate extra GET methods while supporting the normal REST methods as well. Add the following routes to your WebApiConfig:

routes.MapHttpRoute("DefaultApiWithId", "Api/{controller}/{id}", new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }, new { id = @"\d+" });
routes.MapHttpRoute("DefaultApiWithAction", "Api/{controller}/{action}");
routes.MapHttpRoute("DefaultApiGet", "Api/{controller}", new { action = "Get" }, new { httpMethod = new HttpMethodConstraint(HttpMethod.Get) });
routes.MapHttpRoute("DefaultApiPost", "Api/{controller}", new {action = "Post"}, new {httpMethod = new HttpMethodConstraint(HttpMethod.Post)});

I verified this solution with the test class below. I was able to successfully hit each method in my controller below:

public class TestController : ApiController
{
    public string Get()
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }

    public string Get(int id)
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }

    public string GetAll()
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }

    public void Post([FromBody]string value)
    {
    }

    public void Put(int id, [FromBody]string value)
    {
    }

    public void Delete(int id)
    {
    }
}

I verified that it supports the following requests:

GET /Test
GET /Test/1
GET /Test/GetAll
POST /Test
PUT /Test/1
DELETE /Test/1

Note That if your extra GET actions do not begin with 'Get' you may want to add an HttpGet attribute to the method.

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nice solution, could you tell me if I configure the put and delete verbs such as you did on get and post, will work fine too? – Felipe Oriani Mar 13 at 18:18
In my opinion this should be included in the defaults for WebAPI projects (perhaps commented out). It gives you WebAPI AND MVC style routes at the same time... – John Culviner Mar 22 at 22:28
up vote 4 down vote

See this article for a longer discussion of named actions. It also shows that you can use the [HttpGet] attribute instead of prefixing the action name with "get".

http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/web-api-routing-and-actions/routing-in-aspnet-web-api

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