Getting Started With Web API With Sample Application

It will open a dialog for Add New Item, select Visual C# node and select Class and give the proper name “Employee” for the model class and select Add. Modify the code for the model as below:

namespace WebApiSampleProject.Models  
{  
    public class Employee  
    {  
        public int EmployeeId  
        {  
            get;  
            set;  
        }  
        public string EmployeeName  
        {  
            get;  
            set;  
        }  
        public string Address  
        {  
            get;  
            set;  
        }  
        public string Department  
        {  
            get;  
            set;  
        }  
    }  
}

Add a controller

Web API Controller is responsible for handling all HTTP requests which can come from browser, mobile device, desktop web application or any other.

In Solution Explorer, right click the Controllers folder and select Add and then select controller.

Note: Web API controller inherits the ApiController class instead of the Controller class.

It will open Add Scaffold dialog, select the Web API Controller - Empty template and click on Add.

In the Add Controller dialog, give a proper name to the controller, "EmployeeController" and click on Add.

You will see scaffolding creates an “EmployeeController.cs” class inside the controller folder.

Add two methods in the controller “GetAllEmployees” and “GetEmployeeDetails” and make dummy data for the Employee. See the following code:

using System;  
using System.Collections.Generic;  
using System.Linq;  
using System.Net;  
using System.Net.Http;  
using System.Web.Http;  
using WebApiSampleProject.Models;  
namespace WebApiSampleProject.Controllers  
{  
    public class EmployeeController: ApiController  
    {  
        IList < Employee > employees = new List < Employee > ()  
        {  
            new Employee()  
                {  
                    EmployeeId = 1, EmployeeName = "Mukesh Kumar", Address = "New Delhi", Department = "IT"  
                },  
                new Employee()  
                {  
                    EmployeeId = 2, EmployeeName = "Banky Chamber", Address = "London", Department = "HR"  
                },  
                new Employee()  
                {  
                    EmployeeId = 3, EmployeeName = "Rahul Rathor", Address = "Laxmi Nagar", Department = "IT"  
                },  
                new Employee()  
                {  
                    EmployeeId = 4, EmployeeName = "YaduVeer Singh", Address = "Goa", Department = "Sales"  
                },  
                new Employee()  
                {  
                    EmployeeId = 5, EmployeeName = "Manish Sharma", Address = "New Delhi", Department = "HR"  
                },  
        };  
        public IList < Employee > GetAllEmployees()  
        {  
            //Return list of all employees  
            return employees;  
        }  
        public Employee GetEmployeeDetails(int id)  
        {  
            //Return a single employee detail  
            var employee = employees.FirstOrDefault(e => e.EmployeeId == id);  
            if (employee == null)  
            {  
                throw new HttpResponseException(Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.NotFound));  
            }  
            return employee;  
        }  
    }  
}

In the above controller you can see that the method “GetAllEmployees” return the list of all employees and the method “GetEmployeeDetails” returns the detail of single employee. See the following chart which shows how controller use route URL to perform action.

Run the Web API

To see the result, you can just create a client application which will use this web API or you can just simply press F5 or Ctrl+F5. It will open the browser with Url like http://localhost:53037/

To get all employees list, you need to make changes in the Url such as http://localhost:53037/api/employee.

To get the details of single employee, you need to pass the employee id in the Url http://localhost:53037/api/employee/4

Thanks for reading this article, hope you enjoyed it.