toby2o12 / dalsoft.restclient

The dynamic REST Client - the world's fastest REST Client :)

DalSoft.RestClient

Inspired by Simple.Data and AngularJS's $http service, DalSoft.RestClient is a very lightweight wrapper around System.Net.HttpClient that uses the dynamic features of .NET 4 to provide a fluent way of accessing RESTFul API's.

Originally created to remove the boilerplate code involved in creating integration tests and SDK's for RESTFul API's. I know there are a couple of dynamic rest clients out there but I wanted the syntax to look a particular way, and I wanted it to be particularly useful for testing.

DalSoft.RestClient is biased towards RESTFul API's returning JSON - if you don't provide Accept and Content-Type headers then they are set to application/json. See Working with non JSON content

Supported Platforms

DalSoft.RestClient targets .NET Standard 1.4 therefore supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Xamarin (iOS, Android and UWP).

Getting Started

Install via NuGet

PM> Install-Package DalSoft.RestClient

You start by new'ing up the RestClient and passing in the base uri for your RESTful API. Then simply chain members that would make up the resource you want to access - ending with the HTTP method you want to use. The example below will perform a GET on http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/:

dynamic client = new RestClient("http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com");

await client.Users.Get();

Note all HTTP methods are async

New in Version 3.0 Pipeline Awesomeness!

See Configuration, Plugins and Pipeline

Breaking Change Since Version 3.1

Since version 3.1 the DefaultRequestHeaders Dictionary is readonly the only way to add DefaultHeaders is passing a Dictionary to the constructor. You can add/override the headers on a per request basis using the Headers method.

client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("Accept", "application/json"); //Not supported since version 3.1

Everything You Need To Know

• Getting Started

• Supported Platforms

• How to Access Resources

• Get, Delete, Head

• Query Strings

• Put, Post, Patch

• Headers

  • Default Headers
    • Breaking Change Since Version 3.1
  • Per Request Headers

• Dynamic Binding

  • Requests
  • Responses
  • HttpResponseMessage
  • Casting
    • Implicit casting
    • Collections
    • Mapping your models using Json.NET

Advanced

• Working with non JSON content

  • Posting forms
  • Posting files

• Configuration, Plugins and Pipeline

• Available plugins

  • UnitTestHandler
  • FormUrlEncodedHandler
  • MultipartFormDataHandler
  • RetryHandler

• Unit Testing

• Guidance

  • Disposing
  • Retrying Transient Errors
  • Synchronous Usage

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

DalSoft.RestClient is built using the following great open source projects:

• Json.NET
• System.Net.Http

DalSoft.RestClient is inspired by and gives credit to:

• Simple.Data
• This Stack Overflow question
• AngularJS (version 1.x) $http service