ASP.Net WebAPI PatchMap
Earlier in the year I wrote several short articles explaining a concept of creating REST APIs that save entities at a field level:
For the most part they covered the concepts without actually providing a lot of usable code, but that changes today! I’ve published the concept as a library in NuGet called PatchMap: as of this writing the current version has been downloaded 17 times — 16 of which were likely by my mom, who is not a programmer; however, I do feel as though it should be stable enough at this point to use.
Documentation can be found in the repo’s Wiki. Included in the repo are two concrete examples of how to implement the library: one using standard ASP.Net WebApi and Entity Framework 6, along with another example using ASP.Net Core and Entity Framework Core.
Along with the PATCH-ing concepts, the examples include some Response handling techniques that should help you build robust APIs without writing extra code. There are a few extra concepts I’d like to introduce to bring the version up to 1.0.0, but I do not foresee any large scale changes at this point.
So go forth, implement PatchMap, and impress your API consumers with HTTP PATCH awesomeness.
