Difference between ApiController and Controller in ASP NET MVC

Question

I ve been playing around with ASP NET MVC 4 beta and I see two types of controllers now  ApiController and Controller    I m little confused at what situations I can choose a particular controller    For ex  If I want to return a view then I ve to use ApiController or the ordinary Controller  I m aware that the WCF Web API is now integrated with MVC    Since now we can use both controllers can somebody please point at which situations to go for the corresponding controller

User · Answer

Quick n Short Answer If you want to return a view  you should be in  quot Controller quot   Normal Controller - ASP NET MVC  you deal with normal  quot Controller quot  if you are in ASP net Web Application  You can create Controller-Actions and you can return Views    ApiController Controller   you create ApiControllers when you are developing ASP net REST APIs  you can t return Views  though you can return Json Data for HTML as string   These apis are considered as backend and their functions are called to return data not the view Please dont forgt to mark this as answer  take care More Details here

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In Asp net Core 3  Vesrion Controller  If  wants to return anything related to IActionResult  amp  Data also  go for Controllercontroller ApiController  Used as attribute notation in API controller  That inherits ControllerBase Class ControllerBase  If wants to return data only go for ControllerBase class

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I love the fact that ASP NET Core s MVC6 merged the two patterns into one because I often need to support both worlds  While it s true that you can tweak any standard MVC Controller  and or develop your own ActionResult classes  to act  amp  behave just like an ApiController  it can be very hard to maintain and to test  on top of that  having Controllers methods returning ActionResult mixed with others returning raw serialized IHttpActionResult data can be very confusing from a developer perspective  expecially if you re not working alone and need to bring other developers to speed with that hybrid approach   The best technique I ve come so far to minimize that issue in ASP NET non-Core web applications is to import  and properly configure  the Web API package into the MVC-based Web Application  so I can have the best of both worlds  Controllers for Views  ApiControllers for data   In order to do that  you need to do the following    Install the following Web API packages using NuGet  Microsoft AspNet WebApi Core and Microsoft AspNet WebApi WebHost  Add one or more ApiControllers to your  Controllers  folder  Add the following WebApiConfig cs file to your  App Config  folder      using System Web Http   public static class WebApiConfig       public static void Register HttpConfiguration config                   Web API routes         config MapHttpAttributeRoutes             config Routes MapHttpRoute              name   DefaultApi               routeTemplate   api  controller   id                defaults  new   id   RouteParameter Optional                        Finally  you ll need to register the above class to your Startup class  either Startup cs or Global asax cs  depending if you re using OWIN Startup template or not    Startup cs   public void Configuration IAppBuilder app            Register Web API routing support before anything else     GlobalConfiguration Configure WebApiConfig Register           The rest of your file goes there                AreaRegistration RegisterAllAreas        FilterConfig RegisterGlobalFilters GlobalFilters Filters       RouteConfig RegisterRoutes RouteTable Routes       BundleConfig RegisterBundles BundleTable Bundles        ConfigureAuth app                  Global asax cs  protected void Application Start            Register Web API routing support before anything else     GlobalConfiguration Configure WebApiConfig Register           The rest of your file goes there                AreaRegistration RegisterAllAreas        FilterConfig RegisterGlobalFilters GlobalFilters Filters       RouteConfig RegisterRoutes RouteTable Routes       BundleConfig RegisterBundles BundleTable Bundles                  This approach - together with its pros and cons - is further explained in this post I wrote on my blog

User · Answer

Every method in Web API will return data  JSON  without serialization   However  in order to return JSON Data in MVC controllers  we will set the returned Action Result type to JsonResult and call the Json method on our object to ensure it is packaged in JSON

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Which would you rather write and maintain   ASP NET MVC  public class TweetsController   Controller        GET   Tweets     HttpGet    public ActionResult Index         return Json Twitter GetTweets    JsonRequestBehavior AllowGet           ASP NET Web API  public class TweetsController   ApiController        GET   Api Tweets    public List lt Tweet gt  Get         return Twitter GetTweets

User · Answer

Use Controller to render your normal views  ApiController action only return data that is serialized and sent to the client   here is the link  Quote      Note  If you have worked with ASP NET MVC  then you are already familiar with controllers  They work similarly in Web API  but controllers in Web API derive from the ApiController class instead of Controller class  The first major difference you will notice is that actions on Web API controllers do not return views  they return data    ApiControllers are specialized in returning data  For example  they take care of transparently serializing the data into the format requested by the client  Also  they follow a different routing scheme by default  as in  mapping URLs to actions   providing a REST-ful API by convention    You could probably do anything using a Controller instead of an ApiController with the some    manual  coding  In the end  both controllers build upon the ASP NET foundation  But having a REST-ful API is such a common requirement today that WebAPI was created to simplify the implementation of a such an API   It s fairly simple to decide between the two  if you re writing an HTML based web internet intranet application - maybe with the occasional AJAX call returning json here and there - stick with MVC Controller  If you want to provide a data driven REST-ful interface to a system  go with WebAPI  You can combine both  of course  having an ApiController cater AJAX calls from an MVC page   To give a real world example  I m currently working with an ERP system that provides a REST-ful API to its entities  For this API  WebAPI would be a good candidate  At the same time  the ERP system provides a highly AJAX-ified web application that you can use to create queries for the REST-ful API  The web application itself could be implemented as an MVC application  making use of the WebAPI to fetch meta-data etc

User · Answer

The main difference is  Web API is a service for any client  any devices  and MVC Controller only serve its client  The same because it is MVC platform

[asp.net-mvc] Difference between ApiController and Controller in ASP.NET MVC

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