api-guidelines VS JsonApiDotNetCore

📝 "Microsoft REST API Guidelines" [link]

This is a great, thorough and in-depth document from Microsoft: https://github.com/microsoft/api-guidelines/blob/vNext/Guidelines.md

Thing is, I made some researches this morning, and I found nowhere a "data" wrapper, not in Microsoft API best practices [FR] (client is using Microsoft APIs), not in Microsoft API guidelines, not in OpenAPI offical specifications, nowhere in any blog I found this morning.

Microsoft REST API guidelines

I'm working on a web API where I'd like to follow the Microsoft API Guidelines. I thought this would be easy, because surely there would be plenty of libraries out there to support their guidelines, maybe Microsoft even has one out there (I thought). I haven't been able to find any.

Well, that might be true when implementing from the scratch, but using a standard often also means, that someone has implemented a well known library to get rid of the boilerplate and basic decisions.

I personally often use jsonapi.net[1], a C# implementation of JSONAPI. This supports OpenAPI/Swagger with swashbuckle, has a very good filtering implementation and together with Orbit.js[2] it is pretty much without having to decide many things...

[1]: https://www.jsonapi.net/

It's so powerful that it even allows you to establish relationships between operations within a single request, using something called local IDs. Work is progressing quickly on the atomic-operations branch. Check it out on Github if you want to follow along.

In our previous post we setup a basic JSON:API compliant API with the 4.0 release of the JsonApiDotNetCore framework. You can find the code we wrote under the part-1 branch on Github.