Custom method names in ASP.NET Web API

By default the route configuration follows RESTFul conventions meaning that it will accept only the Get, Post, Put and Delete action names (look at the route in global.asax => by default it doesn't allow you to specify any action name => it uses the HTTP verb to dispatch). So when you send a GET request to /api/users/authenticate you are basically calling the Get(int id) action and passing id=authenticate which obviously crashes because your Get action expects an integer.

If you want to have different action names than the standard ones you could modify your route definition in global.asax:

Routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "DefaultApi",
    routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
    defaults: new { action = "get", id = RouteParameter.Optional }
);

Now you can navigate to /api/users/getauthenticate to authenticate the user.

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This is the best method I have come up with so far to incorporate extra GET methods while supporting the normal REST methods as well. Add the following routes to your WebApiConfig:

routes.MapHttpRoute("DefaultApiWithId", "Api/{controller}/{id}", new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }, new { id = @"\d+" });
routes.MapHttpRoute("DefaultApiWithAction", "Api/{controller}/{action}");
routes.MapHttpRoute("DefaultApiGet", "Api/{controller}", new { action = "Get" }, new { httpMethod = new HttpMethodConstraint(HttpMethod.Get) });
routes.MapHttpRoute("DefaultApiPost", "Api/{controller}", new {action = "Post"}, new {httpMethod = new HttpMethodConstraint(HttpMethod.Post)});

I verified this solution with the test class below. I was able to successfully hit each method in my controller below:

public class TestController : ApiController
{
    public string Get()
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }

    public string Get(int id)
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }

    public string GetAll()
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }

    public void Post([FromBody]string value)
    {
    }

    public void Put(int id, [FromBody]string value)
    {
    }

    public void Delete(int id)
    {
    }
}

I verified that it supports the following requests:

GET /Test
GET /Test/1
GET /Test/GetAll
POST /Test
PUT /Test/1
DELETE /Test/1

Note That if your extra GET actions do not begin with 'Get' you may want to add an HttpGet attribute to the method.

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I am days into the MVC4 world.

For what its worth, I have a SitesAPIController, and I needed a custom method, that could be called like:

http://localhost:9000/api/SitesAPI/Disposition/0

With different values for the last parameter to get record with different dispositions.

What Finally worked for me was:

The method in the SitesAPIController:

// GET api/SitesAPI/Disposition/1
[ActionName("Disposition")]
[HttpGet]
public Site Disposition(int disposition)
{
    Site site = db.Sites.Where(s => s.Disposition == disposition).First();
    return site;
}

And this in the WebApiConfig.cs

// this was already there
config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "DefaultApi",
    routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}",
    defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
);

// this i added
config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "Action",
    routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}/{disposition}"
 );

For as long as I was naming the {disposition} as {id} i was encountering:

{
"Message": "No HTTP resource was found that matches the request URI 'http://localhost:9000/api/SitesAPI/Disposition/0'.",
"MessageDetail": "No action was found on the controller 'SitesAPI' that matches the request."
}

When I renamed it to {disposition} it started working. So apparently the parameter name is matched with the value in the placeholder.

Feel free to edit this answer to make it more accurate/explanatory.

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Web Api by default expects URL in the form of api/{controller}/{id}, to override this default routing. you can set routing with any of below two ways.

First option:

Add below route registration in WebApiConfig.cs

config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "CustomApi",
    routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
    defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
);

Decorate your action method with HttpGet and parameters as below

[HttpGet]
public HttpResponseMessage ReadMyData(string param1,
                        string param2, string param3)

 {

// your code here

}

for calling above method url will be like below

http://localhost:[yourport]/api/MyData/ReadMyData?param1=value1&param2=value2&param3=value3

Second option Add route prefix to Controller class and Decorate your action method with HttpGet as below. In this case no need change any WebApiConfig.cs. It can have default routing.

[RoutePrefix("api/{controller}/{action}")]
public class MyDataController : ApiController
{

[HttpGet]
public HttpResponseMessage ReadMyData(string param1,
                        string param2, string param3)

{

// your code here

}

}

for calling above method url will be like below

http://localhost:[yourport]/api/MyData/ReadMyData?param1=value1&param2=value2&param3=value3

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In case you're using ASP.NET 5 with ASP.NET MVC 6, most of these answers simply won't work because you'll normally let MVC create the appropriate route collection for you (using the default RESTful conventions), meaning that you won't find any Routes.MapRoute() call to edit at will.

The ConfigureServices() method invoked by the Startup.cs file will register MVC with the Dependency Injection framework built into ASP.NET 5: that way, when you call ApplicationBuilder.UseMvc() later in that class, the MVC framework will automatically add these default routes to your app. We can take a look of what happens behind the hood by looking at the UseMvc() method implementation within the framework source code:

public static IApplicationBuilder UseMvc(
    [NotNull] this IApplicationBuilder app,
    [NotNull] Action<IRouteBuilder> configureRoutes)
{
    // Verify if AddMvc was done before calling UseMvc
    // We use the MvcMarkerService to make sure if all the services were added.
    MvcServicesHelper.ThrowIfMvcNotRegistered(app.ApplicationServices);

    var routes = new RouteBuilder
    {
        DefaultHandler = new MvcRouteHandler(),
        ServiceProvider = app.ApplicationServices
    };

    configureRoutes(routes);

    // Adding the attribute route comes after running the user-code because
    // we want to respect any changes to the DefaultHandler.
    routes.Routes.Insert(0, AttributeRouting.CreateAttributeMegaRoute(
        routes.DefaultHandler,
        app.ApplicationServices));

    return app.UseRouter(routes.Build());
}

The good thing about this is that the framework now handles all the hard work, iterating through all the Controller's Actions and setting up their default routes, thus saving you some redundant work.

The bad thing is, there's little or no documentation about how you could add your own routes. Luckily enough, you can easily do that by using either a Convention-Based and/or an Attribute-Based approach (aka Attribute Routing).

Convention-Based

In your Startup.cs class, replace this:

app.UseMvc();

with this:

app.UseMvc(routes =>
            {
                // Route Sample A
                routes.MapRoute(
                    name: "RouteSampleA",
                    template: "MyOwnGet",
                    defaults: new { controller = "Items", action = "Get" }
                );
                // Route Sample B
                routes.MapRoute(
                    name: "RouteSampleB",
                    template: "MyOwnPost",
                    defaults: new { controller = "Items", action = "Post" }
                );
            });

Attribute-Based

A great thing about MVC6 is that you can also define routes on a per-controller basis by decorating either the Controller class and/or the Action methods with the appropriate RouteAttribute and/or HttpGet / HttpPost template parameters, such as the following:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc;

namespace MyNamespace.Controllers
{
    [Route("api/[controller]")]
    public class ItemsController : Controller
    {
        // GET: api/items
        [HttpGet()]
        public IEnumerable<string> Get()
        {
            return GetLatestItems();
        }

        // GET: api/items/5
        [HttpGet("{num}")]
        public IEnumerable<string> Get(int num)
        {
            return GetLatestItems(5);
        }       

        // GET: api/items/GetLatestItems
        [HttpGet("GetLatestItems")]
        public IEnumerable<string> GetLatestItems()
        {
            return GetLatestItems(5);
        }

        // GET api/items/GetLatestItems/5
        [HttpGet("GetLatestItems/{num}")]
        public IEnumerable<string> GetLatestItems(int num)
        {
            return new string[] { "test", "test2" };
        }

        // POST: /api/items/PostSomething
        [HttpPost("PostSomething")]
        public IActionResult Post([FromBody]string someData)
        {
            return Content("OK, got it!");
        }
    }
}

This controller will handle the following requests:

 [GET] api/items
 [GET] api/items/5
 [GET] api/items/GetLatestItems
 [GET] api/items/GetLatestItems/5
 [POST] api/items/PostSomething

Also notice that if you use the two approaches togheter, Attribute-based routes (when defined) would override Convention-based ones, and both of them would override the default routes defined by UseMvc().

For more info, you can also read the following post on my blog.

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See this article for a longer discussion of named actions. It also shows that you can use the [HttpGet] attribute instead of prefixing the action name with "get".

http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/web-api-routing-and-actions/routing-in-aspnet-web-api

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Web APi 2 and later versions support a new type of routing, called attribute routing. As the name implies, attribute routing uses attributes to define routes. Attribute routing gives you more control over the URIs in your web API. For example, you can easily create URIs that describe hierarchies of resources.

For example:

[Route("customers/{customerId}/orders")]
public IEnumerable<Order> GetOrdersByCustomer(int customerId) { ... }

Will perfect and you don't need any extra code for example in WebApiConfig.cs. Just you have to be sure web api routing is enabled or not in WebApiConfig.cs , if not you can activate like below:

        // Web API routes
        config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes();

You don't have to do something more or change something in WebApiConfig.cs. For more details you can have a look this article.

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Just modify your WebAPIConfig.cs as bellow

Routes.MapHttpRoute(
  name: "DefaultApi",
  routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
  defaults: new { action = "get", id = RouteParameter.Optional });

Then implement your API as bellow

    // GET: api/Controller_Name/Show/1
    [ActionName("Show")]
    [HttpGet]
    public EventPlanner Id(int id){}

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