Wrap API responses in a standarized format

Question

User1609246636 posted

Good evening,

I'm not really up to date with ASP.NET Core 3.x and I would like to get an advice.

I'm trying to standarize resource API output to look like this:

	{
		"statusCode": 200,
		"statusMessage": "success",
		"meta":
		{
			"count": 1,
			"total": 1,
			"pagination":
			{
				"page": 1,
				"pages": 1,
				"limit": 20
			},
			"filters": [],
			"sorters": []
		},
		"data":
		{
			[
				{
					"id": 3,
					"title": "Test",
					"content": "Content Test",
					"userId": 1,
					"user": null,
					"categoryId": null,
					"category": null,
					"comments": null,
					"tags": null,
					"createdOn": null,
					"updatedOn": null
				}
			]
		}
	}

As opposed to:

[
    {
        "id": 3,
        "title": "Test",
        "content": "Content Test",
        "userId": 1,
        "user": null,
        "categoryId": null,
        "category": null,
        "comments": null,
        "tags": null,
        "createdOn": null,
        "updatedOn": null
    }
]

The approach I've currently applied and works (but I don't find that good) is:

• I have 2 classes: Resource and ResourceCollection
• I use generic T classes in it, where T is basically model I'm trying to return (like Article, Post etc.)
• Return them in controllers as opposed to returning Post or List<Post>
  
  The result? It works - but I don't think it should be done that way, here's the code for ResourceCollection as Resource is pretty similar:

namespace NppService.Resources
{
    public class ResourceCollection<T> where T : class
    {
        public List<T> Data { get; set; }

        public int Count => Data.Count;

        public int Total { get; set; }

        public ResourceCollection(List<T> data, DbContext context = null)
        {
            Data = data;

            if (context == null)
                return;

            Total = context.Set<T>().Count();
        }
    }
}

Thank you in advance for any advices.

Answer 1

User475983607 posted

Use Visual Studio to generate the class structure.  Copy the JSON.  In Visual Studio, Eidt -> Paste Special -> Paste JSON as Classes.  Then simply populate the class.

Answer 2

User-474980206 posted

why not:

public class ApiResponse<T>
{
    public int StatusCode {get; set;} = 200;
    public string StatusMessage {get; set;} = "success";
    public ResponseMetaData Meta {get; set;} = null;
    public T Data {get; set;}
}

then a method is:

public ApiResponse<string> GetString()
{
    return new ApiResponse<string> 
    {
       Data = "hello"
    };
}