F# Data JsonProvider integration with WebAPI

[Daniel Bradley]

Hi, just been doing some musing on leveraging the JsonProvider from F# Data to specify your JSON models in JSON first.

I've created a repo on what this could look like for integrating with WebAPI via their MediaTypeFormatter class with a simple test as an example of returning a JsonProvider type from an action and taking a JsonProvider type as an argument.

It's pretty rough around the edges, but hopefully enough to generate a conversation around a model-first approach to designing APIs. 

Anyone else played with anything similar?

[Ryan Riley]

I hadn't tried it b/c the provider didn't provide a write/update API. How are you creating the JsonValue to serialize on the way out? Otherwise, it looks great! 

[Daniel Bradley]

Gustavo only added the write API reletively recently. 

Essentially, you can just construct the model via its constructor as I do during the update test, then you can just get the underlying JsonValue and write it directly to a stream.