How to structure Web API routes with a MongoDB storage solution

Question

My data structure is fairly simple but I am getting a little confused with how to structure my Web API controllers and routes.

In my data structure a City has a list of Venues and each venue has a list of Events.

This brings me on to the URL routes of the application. Do I have

Option 1

/api/cities/{id} and /api/venues/{id} and /api/events/{id}

But how would that work when POSTing a venue (to a city) or an event (to a venue)?

Option 2

/api/cities/{id} and /api/cities/{cityId}/venues/{id} and /api/cities/{cityId}/venues/{venueId}/events/{id}

Which sort of makes sense because the first call I need to make when using the API is to list all the venues given the city.

Finally am I right in thinking that my API controllers will effectively be getting, upserting and deleting only City documents but will be serving more specific data sets to the client?

Teoman Soygul · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-14 09:23:14Z

0

I usually favor the second options but that requires either attribute routing package or ASP.NET Web API 2 (not released yet).

First option is also valid as an easier approach, as long as your venue object contains a cityId or event object cotains a venueId.

answered Jul 14, 2013 at 9:23

Teoman Soygul

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3 Comments

Greg Over a year ago

Could I just add option 2 routes to my WebApiConfig route maps?

Teoman Soygul Over a year ago

Sure why not. Here is a good example of that: stackoverflow.com/questions/9594671/… even though I find the attribute routing approach a lot cleaner.

Greg Over a year ago

I've decided to have collections for each type and add the parent Ids to the child objects, which is easier to maintain than a list of child objects on parents. So in reality its a little bit of both options! The only issue with this is when I delete a parent I must make sure I loop through recursively the children and delete them too.

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