I have the following interface in my business layer
public interface IUserService
{
void CreateUser(User user);
List<User> FindUsersByName(string searchedString);
User GetUserById(int userId);
User GetUserByCredentials(string login, string password);
void UpdateUser(User user);
void UpdateUserPassword(int userId, string oldPassword, string newPassword);
}
Now I want to provide web API for this interface. As you can see this interface has multiple get methods that return one item GetUserById and GetUserByCredentials, it also has multiple update methods UpdateUser and UpdateUserPassword, in future I might want to add additional get method that returns a collection, like, GetAllUsers, for instance.
The obvious solution was to encapsulate this functionality in one controller.
So what I did first, in WebApiConfig I changed routes configuration to
config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
name: "DefaultApi",
//as you can see I added {action} to the path so that, it will be possible to differentiate between different get/put requests
routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
);
Then I created a UsersController that looks like this
public class UsersController : ApiController
{
private readonly IUserService _userService;
public UsersController(IUserService userService)
{
_userService = userService;
}
// POST api/users/createuser
[HttpPost]
public IHttpActionResult CreateUser(User user)
{
//some code
}
// GET api/users/getuserbyid?id=1
[HttpGet]
public IHttpActionResult GetUserById(int id)
{
//some code
}
// GET api/users/getuserbycredentials?login=log&password=pass
[HttpGet]
public IHttpActionResult GetUserByCredentials(string login, string password)
{
//some code
}
// GET api/users/findusersbyname?searchedString=jack
[HttpGet]
public IHttpActionResult FindUsersByName(string searchedString)
{
//some code
}
// PUT api/users/updateuser
[HttpPut]
public IHttpActionResult UpdateUser(UserBase user)
{
//some code
}
// PUT api/users/updateuserpassword?userId=1&oldPassword=123&newPassword=1234
[HttpPut]
public IHttpActionResult UpdateUserPassword(int userId, string oldPassword, string newPassword)
{
//some code
}
}
As you can see from the code above I have different URIs for each action method, e.g., for GetUserById - api/users/getuserbyid?id=1, for GetUserByCredentials - api/users/getuserbycredentials?login=log&password=pass and so on. This solution works fine so far, but the problem is, as far as I know you cannot have multiple gets according to REST, so does this solution still comply with the constraints for a RESTful service? And if not how can I make it truly RESTful? The idea of splitting this interface into different controllers seems a little odd to me, because in the future I may want to add some new methods to my interface, like, GetUsersByGender, GetUsersByDateOfBirthday and so on (if I'm going to create a new controller each time, that doesn't sound right to me)
