A C# Minimal API project

A simple project in C# involving Minimal API, Entity Framework and SSMS. Allows the user to access and add to different parts of the DB with the use of API calls.

Features

• Interact with the database using API calls(requests).

• Get information about users, genres and movies.

• Connect users to new movies, genres.

• Add Movies to the database and discover movies to any given genre. (Thanks to TheMovieDBs API)

Setup

To setup this project, first you need to clone this repo. And then open the solution in your IDE (Visual studio etc) and make sure to add a appsettings.json file that includes your connection string to the database(I am using MSSQL for this project).

    {
  "ConnectionStrings": {
    "DefaultConnection": "Server=NameOfYourDesktop;Initial Catalog=DB_Name;Integrated Security=true;TrustServerCertificate=True"
  },
  "Logging": {
    "LogLevel": {
      "Default": "Information",
      "Microsoft.AspNetCore": "Warning"
    }
  }
}

First make sure you have dotnet tools installed:

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef

And after that, you simply need to write in the Package Manager Console:

dotnet ef database update

After that your database should be up and running with some testdata and can now be connected used with this program. To start this program simply build it and run it inside visual studio, or build the solution and use it that way.

API Requests and their returned Data

API Requests	Return Data
/api/Persons/	Returns information about all the users in the Database (Id, Name and Email)
/api/Genres/	Returns information about all the genres in the Database (Id, Name and Description)
/api/Genres/FilterByPerson?userID=1	Returns all liked genres of a specified user
/api/Genres/FilterByGenre?Name=Action	An API call that allows the user to get all matching movies to a given genre
/api/Movies/GetMoviesForPerson?userID=1	Get all movies that a user has added to the DB
/api/Ratings/GetRatingsForPerson?userID=1	Get all movies and their ratings that a user has given
/api/ratings/addrating?movieId=2&movieRating=8&personId=1	Allows a person to add ratings to a movie
/api/Genre/AddPersonToGenre?personId=1&genreId=35	Allows a person to like new genres
/api/Movies/Add?title=Die%Hard&link={movieURL}&genres=35,28&personId=1	Allows for addition of new movies and their specified genres to the DB
/api/Movies/Suggestions?genre=action	Searches for new movies with the specified genre (Uses TheMovieDBs API)

Programs and Tools used

• Insomnia - To test and verify that the different API Requests work correctly.

• Minimal API and Swagger to both develop and further test so that everything works.

• Entity Framework to setup the database using Code-First and creating the different tables using Models.

Code Structure:

Method Name	Method Description
Program.cs	This contains all the main logic that runs the API
Models Folder	Contains all the different models that are used to create and update the DB
DataContext.cs	Contains all the DBSet used by the program and also contains the modelbuilders used in the creation of the DB
Migrations Folder	Holds the DB initialization, constraint creation and some Data to fill the database for easier testing

Reflections and other thoughts

Here I will give some thoughts about the different choices I made in the creation of this application. Starting with the database. I went with a code-first design since I wanted to get more practice with Entity Framework and I noticed early how smoothly it went. Both creating, changing and deleting changes became a lot easier with Entity Framework and I am happy that I chose to go down this path. For the API, I went with Minimal API since I had never worked with APIs before and it seemed easier to grasp at first compared to MVC and controllers. For bigger projects I can see why people would choose the other option since the code can get cluttered easier but for smaller APIs such as this one, it seems to be a very good choice. And this project was supposed to deal with Repository Patterns but since I went with the Entity Framework implementation, which already uses Repository Pattern for its usage of DbSet< T > it felt uncessesary to add even more complexity to the code. I felt that the code would get more complex and hard to follow for no real benefit.
I could also have used better naming practices on my API Requests, instead of using "Name=" In most of them. Might have made some of them shorter if the naming was better.

Overall, I am happy with the program and the progress made in a short amount of time, but I still have a lot to learn about the different uses of both Minimal API and MVC. I also got more practice with LINQ in the creation of this application and noticed a lot of potential and will be sure to practice more LINQ.