Instant Rest API from your MS SQL data source? A well designed API is self-documenting. If you know how to work with one REST API, you will quickly learn the quirks of others. InstantWebApi is an API-first product. I spent a lot of time on API design. My intent is to be able to hire multiple teams in parallel, giving them access to my API, and seeing which implementation I like best. They will all be compatible. I can then simply discontinue the less interesting implementation projects.

Benefits of SOAP Over REST. Still, SOAP remains the preferred protocol for certain use cases. The general consensus among experts these days is that REST is the typically preferred protocol unless there’s a compelling reason to use SOAP (and there are some cases in which SOAP is preferred). Because you can achieve most outcomes using either protocol, it’s sometimes a matter of personal preference. However, there are some use cases for which SOAP tends to be better-suited. For instance, if you need more robust security, SOAP’s support for WS-Security can come in handy. It offers some additional assurances for data privacy and integrity. It also provides support for identity verification through intermediaries rather than just point-to-point, as provided by SSL (which is supported by both SOAP and REST).

Use Subresources to Show Relationships: An attractive alternative to only using top-level resources is to use subresources to make the relationships between resources more obvious to the API user, and to reduce dependencies on keys inside the resource representation. So how do you decide what resources should be subresources? A rule of thumb is that if the resource is a part of another resource then it should be a subresource (i.e. composition). For example, if you have a customer, an order and an order line then an order line is a part of an order, but an order is not a part of a customer (i.e. the two exists independently and a customer is not made up of orders!) The idea with subresource is to make your API more readable. For example, even if you don’t know the API you can quickly guess that POST /customer/123/orders will create a new order for customer 123. However, if you end up with more than about two levels then the URI starts to become really long and the readability is reduced.

When I ran InstantWebAPI I get an error message about writing rights. How can this be fixed? If you created the stub solution as an administrator, then InstantWebAPI needs to be run as an administrator as well. We have a database with 80 tables. How many tables and views can this software generate the code for? This code was tested against databases with more than 100 tables. Web API project code gets generated pretty fast, but generating Unit Test code it might take a while. We recommend generating the code for a limited number of tables at a time. We have a database with multiple schema. Can the code be generated for all the schemas at the same time? No, this version of the software only allows generating the code for one schema at a time. Further customization can be added by sending a requests to Customer Service. Read additional details on Use Core EF to build Instant Web API.