Without seeing any code, it sounds like you have the right idea. You can use any client side framework of your choice to interact with your Api Controllers (Knockout, Angular, Ember, Backbone) or you can use straight up jQuery.
Since you are new to ASP.NET Mvc, a little clarification on the differences between the traditional Mvc Controller and the new Api Controller seems in order. In traditional MVC the controllers works to select which view (UI) to display married to data (the model):
public ActionResult Index()
{
var theData = serviceLayer.GetData();
return View("Index", theData);
}
You can also return pure JSON data from a controller:
public JsonResult GetMyData()
{
var theData = serviceLayer.GetData();
return new JsonResult()
{
Data = theData
};
}
This had the problem of making it difficult to determine the names of the endpoints that retrieve UI vs the endpoints that retrieve data. The Web Api is Microsoft's implementation of a RESTful framework. Instead of a controller with many different methods (Index(), GetSingle(), GetMany(), List(), DoSomethingElse(), DoAnotherThing(), etc.), the Api controllers usually contain only methods that correspond to the HTTP Verbs: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. The same endpoint can then be called differing only by the verb you are using. Take the following endpoint for example:
http://mydomain.com/api/customer/1234
Calling this endpoint will do the following for Customer with id=1234:
- GET will return the data
- PUT will update the data
- DELETE will delete the data
In addition to making it clearer for your own development team, the Api also makes it easier for you to expose your data to third parties. You would need to provide a root URL and a list of your objects and any developer would be able to use it. There are other things you would need to do such as implementing security tokens but I wanted to demonstrate the benefits of using an easily understood framework.
