DTO support / models & controllers isolation / serialization mechanism

Hello there!

I’m trying to figure out how to apply JADNC to a bit more complicated cases.

1. For example, we have one model Post that could be updated from multiple endpoints /api/admin/* and /api/client/*. In this case model class should stay the same, but payloads for those endpoints should be different: /api/client/* payload: { "text": "...", "name": "..." } /api/admin/* payload: { "text": "...", name: "...", "showOnMainPage": true }

The case makes me thinking of using 2 different DTO objects here: AdminPostDto and ClientPostDto, but how I can say to the controller to use ClientPostDto as input parameter for CreateAsync action and return Post object itself after the creation? The default behaviour says that Post object is expected as input and as output. Is that possible to change this rule somehow?

1. How I can expose different attributes from the same model, but for the different controllers. For example, Client app should not receive showOnMainPage property, but it’s needed within Admin app

Thanks!

[bart-degreed]

Read the fundamentals of REST at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer. You cannot have two variants of one resource, that would break all caching. So you can have either a single Post resource (at a single URL) or have both AdminPost and UserPost (which are two unrelated resources at different URLs). Serving the same resource at two different URLs breaks the concept of resources with CRUD operations, which is what JSON:API describes.

Resources in JSON:API are more like EF Core entities, not at all like DTOs or view models (which typically have a different structure at each endpoint).

[bart-degreed]

Perhaps you are unaware that JADNC implements the JSON:API specification. That spec defines rules on how URLs, operations, query strings, and payloads are structured. For example, there is no PUT support. Partial patch enables to partially update a subset of resource fields.

I’ve made my point and pointed you in the right direction. Of course, you can build any API you want, but if you’d like to use JADNC then I suggest you read up a bit on the basics instead of asking questions like these.