Passing Request DTO to Get() client method without using IReturn

[Todd Gleason]

I discovered that JsonServiceClient (and probably others) don't let you call Get with just a URL and Request DTO.

If your DTO has IReturn declared, then you can do it, either with a URL or without if the DTO also declares a Route.

You can use Send though, with "GET", the URL, and the DTO. It's very convenient as you can avoid formatting the URL yourself, but it's non-intuitive.

So why not add in a Get<T>() overload that accepts a DTO and avoid using Send() or having to format the URL yourself in C#?

[Demis Bellot]

Because it only should accept a Request DTO (i.e. not just any object) and the url is formatted according to the rules defined in the [Route] attributes.

The IReturn marker constrains it to a Request DTO. I only want to support Request DTO's with IReturn markers as it encourages the type info to be kept in 1 place (which is inferable by tooling/ServiceStack) as opposed to spreading the type info to all the different call sites.

A "T.Get" method issues a HTTP GET Method that doesn't have a HTTP Request body so all the data on the DTO needs to be transformed into a URL.

This doesn't happen when using a Send/Post (which uses a HTTP POST) or Put methods which have the opportunity to just send the serialized Request DTO into the Request body.

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[Todd Gleason]

On Monday, February 4, 2013 12:16:12 PM UTC-7, mythz wrote:

Because it only should accept a Request DTO (i.e. not just any object) and the url is formatted according to the rules defined in the [Route] attributes.

The IReturn marker constrains it to a Request DTO. I only want to support Request DTO's with IReturn markers as it encourages the type info to be kept in 1 place (which is inferable by tooling/ServiceStack) as opposed to spreading the type info to all the different call sites.

A "T.Get" method issues a HTTP GET Method that doesn't have a HTTP Request body so all the data on the DTO needs to be transformed into a URL.

This doesn't happen when using a Send/Post (which uses a HTTP POST) or Put methods which have the opportunity to just send the serialized Request DTO into the Request body.

Actually, it turns out that Get() cannot take a URL + a request DTO implementing IReturn. So if you are doing custom routing (avoiding using the route parameters due to the separation of concerns issues mentioned in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12549981/can-servicestack-services-contain-multiple-methods ), you really can't use Get() unless you want to format the URL yourself.

I'm curious whether other people have found that ServiceStack is hard to use without attribute-based routes.

Is Send() with "GET" the best workaround? I'm looking at an extension method along these lines:

        public static TResponse Get<TResponse>(this ServiceClientBase client, string relativeOrAbsoluteUrl, object request)
        {
            return client.Send<TResponse>("GET", relativeOrAbsoluteUrl, request);
        }

(I could also have typed the request to be IReturn<TResponse> instead of object.)

I know that when I get into the service, it has the request filled out, but did it do so in a non-standard way? It looks like ultimately, if you use "GET" or "HEAD", ServiceClientBase.PrepareWebRequest() will serialize the request to a string and append the string to the Uri anyway. So I don't see anything wrong with doing this.

[Demis Bellot]

Actually, it turns out that Get() cannot take a URL + a request DTO implementing IReturn. 

These are the 2 calling patterns that you can have when you implement IReturn*:

    List<Customer> customers = client.Get(new SearchCustomers { City = "NY" });

or

    List<Customer> customers = client.Get<List<Customer>>("customers?City=NY");

If you didn't implement IReturn* you can only do the latter.

you really can't use Get() unless you want to format the URL yourself.

If you don't want to implement IReturn* then you need to specify the "GET Url" used, if you implement IReturn* you can have typed access and you don't even need to specify any [Route] attributes since the client will fallback to use the pre-defined routes.

I'm curious whether other people have found that ServiceStack is hard to use without attribute-based routes.

Not sure why it matters, use them if you want pretty customized routes, or don't use them and it will fallback to using the pre-defined routes.

Is Send() with "GET" the best workaround? I'm looking at an extension method along these lines..

Sure, tho like I said earlier we want to encourage people to implement the `IReturn` marker which keeps the return type info for the Request DTO in 1 place (rather than repeated in all the different call-sites), that's statically inferable by tooling and verifiable by the compiler.

I know that when I get into the service, it has the request filled out, but did it do so in a non-standard way? It looks like ultimately, if you use "GET" or "HEAD", ServiceClientBase.PrepareWebRequest() will serialize the request to a string and append the string to the Uri anyway. So I don't see anything wrong with doing this.

Not sure what's being asked here.

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