Auto Query search - servicestack

How can I do an auto query with "or" operation like -
http://localhost/rockstars/first_name=MikeORlast_name=Smith

See the Section on changing AutoQuery Behavior where you can change the behavior of every field by annotating Services with [Query(QueryTerm.Or)], e.g:
[Query(QueryTerm.Or)]
public class QueryRockstars : QueryBase<Rockstar> {}
Otherwise if you only want to some of the fields to have "OR" behavior you can decorate them individually with:
public class QueryRockstars : QueryBase<Rockstar>
{
[QueryField(Term=QueryTerm.Or)]
public string FirstName { get; set; }
[QueryField(Term=QueryTerm.Or)]
public string LastName { get; set; }
}
However from a Services design POV applying different behavior is not recommended since ideally each of the fields should have the same semantics.
With the above Request DTO's you can now query it with:
/rockstars?FirstName=Mike&LastName=Smith

Related

Get request with multiple inputs in ServiceStack API

I am creating a endpoint that accepts multiple parameters. I was wondering what the proper way of doing this in ServiceStack is, as I know that the routes can be defined like this:
[Route("/Cars/{EquipmentIds}/{ManufacturerIds}/{ColourIds}")]
But does not that mean that EquipmentIds has to be defined before ManufacturerIds and ColourIds, otherwise the API will interpret it incorrectly?
I would like to specify the parameters I use, and then not include the rest when they are not used.
A unclean url would then look like this ?EquipmentIds=1&ColourIds=1
I found the following solution, but this one was from 2011
Multiple Optional Parameters with ServiceStack.Net.
Is there a new solution for this, or is that still the proper way of doing things?
The URL should be a "resource identifier" where any Query String arguments are modifiers to that resource request.
So you shouldn't put complex types in the /path/info which are unlikely to form part of Resource Identifier for that route.
Your route should be self-describing as to what it's a resource identifier of. Stuffing a an anonymous bunch of ids in the URL doesn't make it a clean URL, it still needs to be semantically correct and self-describing at what the different path components contain.
It's hard to know the right Route to use when it's not clear what Service this is used for, but if this was a Car Search Service the appropriate URL would be something like:
/cars/search?EquipmentIds=1,2,3&ManufacturerIds=4,5,6&ColourIds=7,8,9
Just as when you use a Search Service like Google, they don't try to pack everything in the route, which is only used to identify you're making a search request. Everything else including the search query is added to the query string, e.g;
https://www.google.com/search?q=test
Which in ServiceStack would just be defined as:
[Route("/cars/search")]
public class SearchCars
{
public List<int> EquipmentIds { get; set; }
public List<int> ManufacturerIds { get; set; }
public List<int> ColourIds { get; set; }
}
Or it can be easily auto implemented in AutoQuery with:
[Route("/cars/search")]
public class SearchCars : QueryDb<Car>
{
public List<int> EquipmentIds { get; set; }
public List<int> ManufacturerIds { get; set; }
public List<int> ColourIds { get; set; }
}

CRUD and Query with ServiceStack - Need to get rid of some confusion

I am a bit confused with ServiceStack 'old' and 'new' API and need some clarification and best practices, especially with Request / Response DTO's and routing. I watched some courses on Pluralsight and have the first three books listet on servicestack.net in my electronic bookshelf.
I like to 'restify' an existing application which is built using DDD patterns which means I have a high level of abstraction. The client is WPF and follows the MVVM pattern. I have 'client side service', 'server side service' and repository classes (and some aggregates too). I use NHibernate 4 (with fluent API and a code-first approach) as ORM. Only my repository classes know about the ORM. I have DTO's for all my Entity objects and in my WPF client I only work with those DTOs in the ViewModel classes. I heavily use AutoMapper to 'transfer' Entity objects to my DTO's and vice versa.
My confusion starts exactly with these DTO's and the Request / Response DTOs used in ServiceStack. Here is a very much simplified example of an Address Entity which illustrates the problem:
All my Entity Objects derive from EntityBase which contains basic properties used in all Entities:
public abstract class EntityBase : IEntity
{
public virtual Guid Id { get; protected set; }
public virtual DateTime CDate { get; set; } //creation date
public virtual string CUser { get; set; } //creation user
public virtual DateTime MDate { get; set; } //last modification date
public virtual string MUser { get; set; } //last modification user
//
// some operators and helper methods irrelevant for the question
// ....
}
public class Address : EntityBase
{
public string Street { get; private set; }
public string AdrInfo1 { get; private set; }
public string AdrInfo2 { get; private set; }
public string ZipCode { get; private set; }
public string City { get; private set; }
public string Country { get; private set; }
}
Of course there are collections and references to related objects which are ignored here as well as database mappers, naming conventions etc. The DTO I have looks like this:
public class AddressDto
{
public Guid Id { get; set; } // NHibernate GUID.comb, NO autoincrement ints!!
public DateTime CDate { get; set; }
public string CUser { get; set; }
public DateTime MDate { get; set; }
public string MUser { get; set; }
public string Street { get; private set; }
public string AdrInfo1 { get; private set; }
public string AdrInfo2 { get; private set; }
public string ZipCode { get; private set; }
public string City { get; private set; }
public string Country { get; private set; }
}
To use this with ServiceStack I need to support the following:
CRUD functionality
Filter / search functionality
So my 'Address service' should have the following methods:
GetAddresses (ALL, ById, ByZip, ByCountry, ByCity)
AddAddress (Complete AddressDTO without Id. CDate, CUser are filled automatically without user input)
UpdateAddress (Complete AddressDTO without CUser and CDate, MDate and MUser filled automatically without user input)
DeleteAddress (Just the Id)
For me it is pretty clear, that all Requests return either a single AddressDto or a List<AddressDto> as ResponseDTO except for the delete which should just return a status object.
But how to define all those RequestDTO's? Do I really have to define one DTO for EACH scenario?? In the books I only saw samples like:
[Route("/addresses", "GET")]
public class GetAddresses : IReturn<AddressesResponse> { }
[Route("/addresses/{Id}", "GET")]
public class GetAddressById : IReturn<AddressResponse>
{
public Guid Id { get; set; }
}
[Route("/addresses/{City}", "GET")]
public class GetAddressByCity : IReturn<AddressResponse>
{
public string City { get; set; }
}
// .... etc.
This is a lot of boilerplate code and remembers me a lot of old IDL compilers I used in C++ and CORBA.....
Especially for Create and Update I should be able to 'share' one DTO or even better reuse my existing DTO... For delete there is probably not much choice....
And then the filters. I have other DTOs with a lot more properties. A function approach like used in WCF, RPC etc is hell to code...
In my repositories I pass an entire DTO and use a predicate builder class which composes the LINQ where clause depending on the properties filled. This looks something like this:
List<AddressDto> addresses;
Expression<Func<Address, bool>> filter = PredicateBuilder.True<Address>();
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(address.Zip))
filter = filter.And(s => s.Zip == address.Zip);
// .... etc check all properties and dynamically build the filter
addresses = NhSession.Query<Address>()
.Where(filter)
.Select(a => new AddressDto
{
Id = a.Id,
CDate = a.CDate,
//.... etc
}).ToList();
Is there anything similar I could do with my RequestDTO and how should the routing be defined?
A lot of questions raised here have been covered in existing linked answers below. The Request / Response DTOs are what you use to define your Service Contract, i.e. instead of using RPC method signatures, you define your contract with messages that your Service accepts (Request DTO) and returns (Response DTO). This previous example also walks through guidelines on designing HTTP APIs with ServicesStack.
Use of well-defined DTOs have a very important role in Services:
You want to ensure all types your Services return are in DTOs since this, along with the base url of where your Services are hosted is all that's required for your Service Consumers to know in order to consume your Services. Which they can use with any of the .NET Service Clients to get an end-to-end Typed API without code-gen, tooling or any other artificial machinery.
DTOs are what defines your Services contract, keeping them isolated from any Server implementation is how your Service is able to encapsulate its capabilities (which can be of unbounded complexity) and make them available behind a remote facade. It separates what your Service provides from the complexity in how it realizes it. It defines the API for your Service and tells Service Consumers the minimum info they need to know to discover what functionality your Services provide and how to consume them (maintaining a similar role to Header files in C/C++ source code). Well-defined Service contracts decoupled from implementation, enforces interoperability ensuring that your Services don't mandate specific client implementations, ensuring they can be consumed by any HTTP Client on any platform. DTOs also define the shape and structure of your Services wire-format, ensuring they can be cleanly deserialized into native data structures, eliminating the effort in manually parsing Service Responses.
Auto Queryable Services
If you're doing a lot of data driven Services I recommend taking a look at AutoQuery which lets you define fully queryable Services without an implementation using just your Services Request DTO definition.

Azure Search Hierarchical Search Field

I am evaluating Azure Search for a project. The MSDN articles are having only Flattened schema structure. Below is an example scenario i am looking at.
The below is "Project" class having reference to List of "Question" class. And "Question" has it's own set of fields
public class Project
{
public Guid Id
{
get;
set;
}
public string Owner
{
get;
set;
}
public string Title
{
get;
set;
}
public List<Question> QuestionList
{
get;
set;
}
public bool Disable
{
get;
set;
}
}
public class Question
{
public Guid Id { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
public string Description { get; set; }
}
Below will be Index Schema for Project
Id - Edm.String
Owner - Edm.String
Title - Edm.String
QuestionList - Collection(Edm.String)
Questions
Is it possible to specify each item in QuestionList has hierarchical data?
Is it possible to Search only inside "Title" of "Question"?
The only possibility i see is to create Index for "Question" separately and use it
The only point i see in MSDN relevant is the below paragraph and i can't make much sense of it
Levels in faceted navigation
As noted, there is no direct support for nesting facets in a
hierarchy. Out of the box, faceted navigation only supports one level
of filters. However, workarounds do exist. You can encode a
hierarchical facet structure in a Collection(Edm.String) with one
entry point per hierarchy. Implementing this workaround is beyond the
scope of this article, but you can read about collections in OData by
Example.
For your first question, Azure Search does not allow for hierarchical datatypes, and to search you would need to flatten the data as you did for the QuestionList field which you created as a Collection. If you were asking how to also filter results based on items in this Collection, you can do that using OData Expressions such as $filter=QuestionList/any(t: t eq 'Question1') (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn798921.aspx)
I think for your second question, you were interested searching only in "Title" or "Question", correct? For this, you can use the SearchFields parameter (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn798927.aspx).
Liam

ServiceStack AutoQuery, Multiple IJoin

In my example I have the following database structure. Order has many OrderLine, which has one Product.
I am trying to return the following DTO:
public class OrderLineDto {
public int Id { get; set; }
public int Quantity { get; set; }
public string OrderType { get; set; }
public string ProductName { get; set; }
}
This should be possible by use of the following Query Route:
[Route("/orderlines")]
public class FindOrderLines : QueryBase<OrderLine, OrderLineDto>,
IJoin<OrderLine, Order>,
IJoin<OrderLine, Product>
{ }
What I am trying to do here is join OrderLine in both directions to bring in Type from Order, and Name from Product and return it in an OrderLineDto.
I am able to do these things individually by only using one IJoin, however AutoQuery appears only to use the first IJoin interface declaration, and does not perform the second join.
If I attempt to do a join like this: IJoin<OrderLine, Order, Product>
I get the following exception: Could not infer relationship between Order and Product
Is it possible to achieve what I am trying to do here with auto query or should I go back to writing standard REST services, abandoning AutoQuery?
I have submitted a pull request to ServiceStack which will now allow this behavior.
https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/pull/955

How can I bind multiple 'Keys' to a single property on a Service Stack Request DTO

I have a DTO that goes something like this:
public class Request {
public id ASpecificIdentifier { get; set; }
public string PreciseDescription { get; set; }
public string FirstPartOfSomeonesName { get; set; }
}
Whilst I'm happy accepting this as the official 'Input', I would also like to be able to bind them to multiple keys. The reason for this will be serialized to a client in an encrypted JSON object, so I would like to keep the length down.
For example they should also be able to pass:
{
"Id":1,
"Desc":"My Issue",
"Name":"Bob"
}
How can I achieve this? I have looked around at the Attributes supplied but non seem to be able to allow this behaviour?
You could create multiple DTOs for each scenario you allow (set of named parameters). Then in your service you would have to handle each DTO and translate them a common DTO to take action.
Or Another way would be to have a DTO that takes a generic key/value parameter. This will make your DTOs very flexible but you will lose some of the advantages of strong typing.
For Example:
public class Request {
Dictionary<string,string> Properties { get; set; }
}

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