OData is an open protocol for enabling interaction with a datasource in a standardised way via a RESTful API. Theoretically using OData in combination with Entity Framweork should provide a simple way of providing access to SQL (or other) data via API, this is indeed the case but setting things Read more…
Bootstrap Table is the best way I’ve found of adding additional functionality to HTML tables. One of the nice features about it is that it will load data from a URL if it’s provided in the correct JSON format which allows the data provision to be decoupled from the page Read more…
As part of a recent project I’ve had to download a gzipped file of product details from a client endpoint and to load these products into a local SQL database. Although this is easy enough to do in discrete synchronous steps as below what I really wanted to do was Read more…
While there seems to be plenty of resources and guides out there to help users create an API there seems to be much less guidance on how to create a client for accessing an API. I’m fine with calling an API using HttpClient or through a library such as RestSharp Read more…
I’ve recently started getting to grips with the API Management service in Azure which seems to be a good way of managing access to resources and to document their usage. Part of this is the Developer Portal which acts as a centralized store of knowledge for using your APIs which Read more…
There’s a pretty comprehensive set of APIs available for interacting with Azure resources but unfortunately these seem to be so new that there’s not really much documentation around on how to use them. For an example of the information that can be returned by these APIs you can use the Read more…
IdentityServer4 is an OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 framework for ASP.NET Core 2 which can be used to manage authentication for web applications. In my case I wanted to set up OAuth 2.0 authentication using a SQL backend for an API, this isn’t too tricky when you know what you’re Read more…
Although there’s plenty of documentation by Microsoft on how to use their Bing Ads API the documentation on how to initially connect to it seems a bit fragmented so this is an attempt to summarize all the steps required to grant a console application access to the API. Most of Read more…
Bing Image Search API The Image Search API lets you query the Bing search engine for a list of relevant images, in order to access it you need a cognitive services API key obtained from the Azure portal. The API endpoint can be accessed directly by structuring queries using the Read more…
ASP.NET Core API Routing When creating a new API controller in a Web Application the template code created if you choose to include read/write actions provides a good overview of how to pass values through to the API methods and return results. The template assumes that the controller only has Read more…