Building and Securing RESTful APIs in ASP.NET Core

Course details

Most people have heard of RESTful APIs, but the underlying concept—representational state transfer (REST)—still causes confusion. REST is all about modeling resources that change. RESTful APIs use REST architecture along with HTTP requests to transfer data and changes in application state between clients and servers. This course breaks down the principles of RESTful design and show how to build secure RESTful APIs on top of ASP.NET Core. Nate Barbettini answers questions such as: What is RESTful design? How do you perform RESTful routing? How can you build reusable classes to represent resources? What role does caching play? And how do you secure RESTful APIs? He also covers topics such as data modeling, hypermedia relationships, and authentication and authorization. By the end of the course, you should know the basics—how to properly request and return data in ASP.NET Core—and the best practices for building secure and scalable APIs to serve web clients, mobile clients, and beyond.
Learning objectives
What is RESTful design?
Building a new API with ASP.NET Core
Using HTTP methods
Returning JSON
Creating RESTful routing with templates
Versioning
Securing RESTful APIs with HTTPS
Representing resources
Representing links
Representing collections
Sorting and searching collections
Building forms
Adding caching to an ASP.NET Core API
Configuring user authentication and authorization

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - The power of RESTful APIs
02 - What you should know
03 - Example API introduction

1. REST API Concepts

04 - What is REST
05 - REST vs. RPC
06 - Self-documentation and HATEOAS
07 - HTTP methods
08 - Full and partial updates
09 - Returning JSON
10 - The Ion hypermedia type

2. Build a Basic API

11 - Create a new project
12 - Configure MVC
13 - Create a root controller
14 - Test with Postman
15 - Route to controllers with templates
16 - Introduction to OpenAPI
17 - Add NSwag to the project

3. Versioning and Errors

18 - Approaches to API versioning
19 - Add versioning support
20 - Serialize exceptions as JSON

4. Secure the API

21 - Transport security in ASP.NET Core
22 - Require HTTPS
23 - Test HTTPS locally
24 - How CORS works
25 - Add CORS middleware

5. Represent Resources

26 - Create a resource class
27 - Load data from configuration
28 - Return data from a controller
29 - Set up an in-memory database
30 - Create data model classes
31 - Seed the database with test data
32 - Return a resource from a controller
33 - Move data access to a service
34 - Map models automatically

6. Represent Links

35 - Create a Link class
36 - Rewrite Links with a filter
37 - Rewrite resource HREFs

7. Represent Collections

38 - Create a Collection class
39 - Return all resources in a collection
40 - Add pagination
41 - Paging defaults and validation
42 - Add navigation to paged collections

8. Sorting Collections

43 - Design collection sort
44 - Add sort attributes
45 - Validate sort parameters
46 - Build sort expressions dynamically
47 - Add a default sort term

9. Searching Collections

48 - Design collection search
49 - Add search attributes
50 - Validate search parameters
51 - Build search expressions dynamically
52 - Extend search to other types
53 - Add comparison operators

10. Forms and Modifying Data

54 - Forms in Ion
55 - Create a POST action
56 - Delete a resource
57 - Serialize the form metadata
58 - Discoverable queries using forms

11. Caching and Compression

59 - Compress responses
60 - How HTTP caching works
61 - Add the Cache-Control header
62 - Support the ETag header
63 - Add server-side caching

12. Authentication and Authorization

64 - How HTTP authentication works
65 - Authentication for REST APIs
66 - Add Identity
67 - Add a test user
68 - Create a users collection
69 - Create a registration route
70 - Add OpenIddict
71 - Add a token endpoint
72 - Create a UserInfo route
73 - More about OpenID Connect
74 - Authorization using policies

Conclusion

75 - Next steps