MVC Web Api - barebones minimal project structure

Question

I'm looking at this MVC WebApi starter kit (for Angular/TypeScript)

Ignoring all the client side code, I noticed the author has made a WebApi that is extremely bare bones. Has has taken out most scaffolding including _ViewStart.cshtml, _Layout.cshtml, and forgoed the convention of controllers in Controllers folder and views in View folder under subdirectory with same name of controller, etc.

He added some interesting Routing and Validation classes that I havent seen before in a Core folder and put controllers in Api folder and Views directly into Views folder with an Index.cshtml at the root.

It's very clean and barebone project structure for a standalone web api that will do nothing except serve data to a client heavy application. I kind of like it this way but before jumping ship I'm wondering what drawbacks this approach has and if I'm actually giving up any core features of the framework by doing it this way. For example, clearly MVC Areas are being given up here in favor of flexibility to create your own view folders structure and seperation of application sections (I'm okay with getting rid of MVC Areas I rarely used them anyways). Another thing is I don't think a Controller action method can return View() and it will find it in the Views folder by convention of the controller name. I'm also okay with that since I will only be serving JSON data and will use 100% client side templating.

Are there any other core features that are being abandoned that I'm missing that may make me regret going with this project structure?

Darrel Miller · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-24 05:19:33Z

2

When I create Web APIs that are hosted in IIS, the only files in my web application are web.config, global.asax and global.asax.cs. Everything else is not required.

answered Jan 24, 2014 at 5:19

Darrel Miller

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Vladimir Kocjancic Over a year ago

Care to elaborate on what do you actually do?

Darrel Miller Over a year ago

@VladimirKocjancic I wrote a blog post that demos how to do it here bizcoder.com/the-simplest-possible-asp-net-web-api-template and the source is github.com/darrelmiller/SimpleApiTemplate

ThisGuy · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-24 07:05:11Z

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Take a look at this template if you haven't already before you decide how to structure your ASP.Net MVC / Angular project:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/5af151b2-9ed2-4809-bfe8-27566bfe7d83

You can always add components into your project later, so I wouldn't seat it too much. I like to start with a lean/mostly empty project first and add things myself so that I fully understand what I'm adding.

answered Jan 24, 2014 at 7:05

ThisGuy

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