Web API code generator from MS SQL? Representational State Transfer (REST or RESTful) is a technical description of how the World Wide Web works. If to imagine that the Web is a device, and it could have an operating system, its architectural style would be RESTful. A RESTful API is a type of web server that enables user-operated or automated clients to access resources that model a system’s data and functions. A well-designed REST API entice developers to use the web service and is today a must-have feature.

Thanks to JSON, REST offers better support for browser clients. REST provides superior performance, particularly through caching for information that’s not altered and not dynamic. REST is the protocol used most often for major services such as Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, and even Google. REST is generally faster and uses less bandwidth. It’s also easier to integrate with existing websites with no need to refactor site infrastructure. This enables developers to work faster rather than spend time rewriting a site from scratch. Instead, they can simply add additional functionality.

Use Subresources to Show Relationships: An attractive alternative to only using top-level resources is to use subresources to make the relationships between resources more obvious to the API user, and to reduce dependencies on keys inside the resource representation. So how do you decide what resources should be subresources? A rule of thumb is that if the resource is a part of another resource then it should be a subresource (i.e. composition). For example, if you have a customer, an order and an order line then an order line is a part of an order, but an order is not a part of a customer (i.e. the two exists independently and a customer is not made up of orders!) The idea with subresource is to make your API more readable. For example, even if you don’t know the API you can quickly guess that POST /customer/123/orders will create a new order for customer 123. However, if you end up with more than about two levels then the URI starts to become really long and the readability is reduced.

When I ran InstantWebAPI I get an error message about writing rights. How can this be fixed? If you created the stub solution as an administrator, then InstantWebAPI needs to be run as an administrator as well. We have a database with 80 tables. How many tables and views can this software generate the code for? This code was tested against databases with more than 100 tables. Web API project code gets generated pretty fast, but generating Unit Test code it might take a while. We recommend generating the code for a limited number of tables at a time. We have a database with multiple schema. Can the code be generated for all the schemas at the same time? No, this version of the software only allows generating the code for one schema at a time. Further customization can be added by sending a requests to Customer Service. Discover more info on Instant Rest API from your MS SQL database.