JTOne123 / Winton.DomainModelling.AspNetCore

Provides conventions for creating an ASP.NET Core based REST API on top of a domain model

Winton.DomainModelling.AspNetCore

Conventions useful for creating an ASP.NET Core based REST API on top of a domain model. Specifically, it provides extension methods which convert from domain model types, as defined in Winton.DomainModelling.Abstractions to ASP.NET Core types.

Result Extensions

Result<TData> is a type defined in the Winton.DomainModelling.Abstractions package. It is a type that is intended to be returned from domain operations. It allows operations to indicate both successes and failures to the client. In this case the client is an ASP.NET Core Controller. In a Controller, however, we need to return an IActionResult rather than a Result<TData>. We have two cases to consider:

• If the Result<TData> was a success then we want to return a 2xx response from the API containing the data in the body.
• If the Result<TData> was a failure then we want to return a 4xx response from the API containing problem details in the body.

This library provides a ToActionResult extension method for Result<TData> which matches on the result and converts it to an appropriate IActionResult. There are various overloads to provide flexibility. It is expected that this will be used within an ApiController so that ASP.NET Core will apply its REST API conventions to the IActionResult.

Successful Result Mappings

The following default mappings happen when the Result is a Success.

Result	IActionResult	HTTP Status
Success<TData>	ActionResult<TData>	200 Ok
Success<Unit>	NoContentResult	204 NoContent

The defaults can be overriden by calling the extension method that takes a success mapping function. A common example of when this is used is in a POST action when an entity has been created and we would like to return a 201 Created response to the client.

[HttpPost]
public async Task<IActionResult> CreateFoo(NewFoo newFoo)
{
    return await CreateFoo(newFoo.Bar)
        .Select(FooResource.Create)
        .ToActionResult(
            f => Created(
                Url.Action(nameof(Get), new { f.Id }),
                f));
}

The CreateFoo method performs the domain logic to create a new Foo and returns Result<Foo>.

In a real application it would be defined in the domain model project. To give the domain model an API which is defined in terms of commands and queries and to decouple it from the outer application layers the mediator pattern is often adopted. Jimmy Bogard's MediatR is a useful library for implementing that pattern.

Failure Result Mappings

If the Result is a Failure then the Error it contains is mapped to a ProblemDetails and is wrapped in an IActionResult with the corresponding status code.

The following table shows the default mappings.

Error	IActionResult	HTTP Status
Error*	BadRequestResult	400 BadRequest
UnauthorizedError	ForbidResult	403 Forbidden
NotFoundError	NoContentResult	404 NotFound

*This includes any other types that inherit from Error and are not explicitly listed.

The defaults can be overriden by calling the extension method that takes an error mapping function. This is useful when the domain model has defined additional error types and these need to be converted to the relevant problem details. The status code that is set on the ProblemDetails will also be set on the IActionResult by the extension method so that the HTTP status code on the response is correct.

For example consider a domain model that deals with payments. It could be a news service which requires a subscription to access content. It might contain several operations that require payment to be made before they can proceed. This domain may therefore define a new error type as follows:

public class PaymentRequired : Error
{
    public PaymentRequired(string detail)
        : base("Payment Required", detail)
    {
    }
}

It would therefore make sense to map this to a 402 Payment Required HTTP response with relevant ProblemDetails. This can be achieved like so:

[HttpGet("{id}")]
public async Task<IActionResult> GetNewsItem(string id)
{
    return await GetNewsItem(id)
        .ToActionResult(
            error => new ProblemDetails
            {
                Detail = error.Detail,
                Status = StatusCodes.Status402PaymentRequired,
                Title = error.Title,
                Type = "https://example.com/problems/payment-required"
            }
        )
}

The type field should return a URI that resolves to human-readable documentation about the type of error that has occurred. This can either be existing documentation, such as https://httpstatuses.com for common errors, or your own documentation for domain-specific errors.

Problem details is formally documented in RFC 7807. More information about how the fields should be used can be found there.

In order to maintain a loose coupling between the API layer and the domain model each action method should know how to map any kind of domain error. To achieve this we could define a function that does this mapping for us and then use it throughout. For example:

internal static ProblemDetails MapDomainErrors(Error error)
{
    switch (error)
    {
        case PaymentRequired _:
            return new ProblemDetails
            {
                Detail = error.Detail,
                Status = StatusCodes.Status402PaymentRequired,
                Title = error.Title,
                Type = "https://example.com/problems/payment-required"
            }
        // handle other custom types
        default:
            return null;
    }
}

By using C# pattern matching we can easily match on the type of error and map it to a ProblemDetails. Returning null in the default case means the existing error mappings for the common error types, as defined above, are used.

If you have a custom error type and you are happy for your REST API to return 400 Bad Request when it occurs, then the default error mappings for the base Error type should already work for you. It maps the error's details and title to the corresponding fields on the problem details.