C# Corner
ServiceStack and Razor Forms
I can now put http://localhost:61174/movielist in my browser and get my custom HTML.
Add and Delete Functionality
To make this service really useful, I'll implement the ability to add new movies, as well as remove movies from my list. This is as easy as adding a "Post" (add) and a "Delete" (remove) method to my service, as you can see in Listing 3.
Listing 3: Add and Delete Functionality of MovieService
public MoviesResponse Post(MoviesRequest request)
{
movies.Add(new Movie
{
Title = request.Title,
IsPoor = request.IsPoor.Value
});
return new MoviesResponse(movies);
}
public MoviesResponse Delete(MoviesRequest request)
{
movies = movies.Where(m => !(m.Title == request.Title && m.IsPoor == request.IsPoor))
.ToList();
return new MoviesResponse(movies);
}
To test this, I'll open up Postman (bit.ly/1YYNrkb), my favorite Chrome add-in for API testing. I'll construct a request to my service to add another movie:
I click Postman's Send button and my response is an updated list of movies. If I go back to my browser and refresh the movielist page, I'll see the new movie. Now I can go back to Postman, leave the body the same and change the verb to DELETE. I press Send, go back and refresh the “movielist” page, and I get an updated list of movies that has the new movie removed.
Of course, we don't want our users using Postman to access this service. Download the sample code for this article and you'll see how I created a complete single-page app against this service (http://localhost:61174/movies). I also took the time to create a Layout page to really showcase how easy it is to move your Razor knowledge to ServiceStack.
Wrapping Up
This article covered just the basics of using HTML from within ServiceStack. There's so much more I didn't have time to cover:
- The ServiceStack Razor pages have built-in access to the ServiceStack IOC container (funq).
- ServiceStack's ability to be run from a Windows Service means you could easily create a Web-based configuration page for your Windows services.
- Custom error pages.
- Cascading Layout templates.
- Dynamic view model support (easily grab QueryString, FormData, Cookie values without needing to define a model).
If you'd like to see any of these topics covered, feel free to drop me an e-mail.
About the Author
Patrick Steele is a senior .NET developer with Billhighway in Troy, Mich. A recognized expert on the Microsoft .NET Framework, he’s a former Microsoft MVP award winner and a presenter at conferences and user group meetings.