Route all Web API requests to one controller method

Question

Is it possible to customize ASP.NET Web API's routing mechanism to route all requests to the API to one controller method?

If a request comes in to

www.mysite.com/api/products/

or

www.mysite.com/api/otherResource/7

All would be routed to my SuperDuperController's Get() method?

Answer 1

I don't konw why you would want to do this and I certainly wouldn't recommend routing everything through one controller, however you could achieve this as follows. Assuming you are only ever going to have a resource with an optional id in your calls, add this to your WebApiConfig:

public static class WebApiConfig
{
    public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
    {
        config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
            name: "DefaultApi",
            routeTemplate: "api/{resource}/{id}",
            defaults: new { controller = "SuperDuper", id = RouteParameter.Optional }
        );
    }
}

Then define your controller method as follows:

public class SuperDuperController : ApiController
{
    public IHttpActionResult Get(string resource, int? id = null)
    {
        return Ok();
    }
}

You would need to decide on an appropriate IHttpActionResult to return for each different type of resource.

Alternatively using Attribute Routing, ensure that config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes() is present in your WebApiConfig and add the following attributes to your controller method:

[RoutePrefix("api")]
public class SuperDuperController : ApiController
{
    [Route("{resource}/{id?}")]
    public IHttpActionResult Get(string resource, int? id = null)
    {
        return Ok();
    }
}

Answer 2

I ran into a case where I needed to do this. (Web API 2)

I first looked into creating custom IHttpControllerSelector and IHttpActionSelectors. However, that was a bit of a murky way around. So I finally settled on this dead simple implementation. All you have to do is setup a wildcard route. Example:

public class SuperDuperController : ApiController
{
    [Route("api/{*url}")]
    public HttpResponseMessage Get()
    {
        // url information
        Request.RequestUri
        // route values, including "url"
        Request.GetRouteData().Values
    }
}

Any GET request that starts with "api/" will get routed to the above method. That includes the above mentioned URLs in your question. You will have to dig out information from the Request or context objects yourself since this circumvents automatic route value and model parsing.

The good thing about this is you can still use other controllers as well (as long as their routes don't start with "api/").