aarontorgerson / resourceful

A poorly-named .NET library to map your API models to RESTful resource representations.

Resourceful

A poorly-named .NET library to map your API models to RESTful resource representations.

• Add hypermedia links (haters gonna HATEOAS).
• Perform transformations that obviate the need for view models/dtos.

Say you've got a model, like

public class Thing
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

Why go to the trouble of making a dto just to get hypermedia links? Use Resourceful to take care of that for you. In your app startup code:

ResourceMapper.CreateMapping<Thing>("/things/{Id}");

In your action, map your model to its resource representation.

var model = new Thing 
{
    Id = 1, 
    Name = "Foo"
};

return model.AsResource();

Behold!

{
    'Id' : 1,
    'Name' : 'Foo',
    '_Relationships' : {
        'Self' : '/things/1'
    }
}

Wait a mintue, though... that Id clutters things up now that we have a nice Self link. Let's tweak our mapping.

ResourceMapper.CreateMapping<Thing>("/things/{Id}")
              .OmitProperty("Id");

Better.

{
    'Name' : 'Foo',
    '_Relationships' : {
        'Self' : '/things/1'
    }
}

Now, how can we find Blerks that have this Thing?

ResourceMapper.CreateMapping<Thing>("/things/{Id}")
              .OmitProperty("Id")
              .AddRelationship("BlerksWithThisThing", "/blerks/?thingId={Id}");

Perfect.

{
    'Name' : 'Foo',
    '_Relationships' : {
        'Self' : '/things/1',
        'BlerksWithThisThing' : '/blerks/?thingId=1'
    }
}

resourceful's Issues

Not thread-safe when not-yet-seen types are added to the TypeMap on the fly.

Allow omitting model properties from resource representation.

Support property transformers to allow custom transformations.

Profiling shows that building up the response using ExpanoObjects is quite slow

Try switching to Dictionaries then return the root as a dynamic?

Relationship name/values should be a dictionary

Provide capability to do things like change property name casing when mapping

Allow mapping a resource without a Self uri

Audit of API types: property visibility to clients

Make sure only the appropriate properties/methods are visible to clients.

ResourceMapping.AddLink should be called AddRelationship