If you’re reading this page, you survived part 1 and are willing to continue. Good job! In this part, we’ll make good use of what we’ve learned so far and put it into practice to implement the main data-related development tasks required by a typical web API project. After completing this part, you’ll be able to create simple yet fully working web APIs that are capable of dealing with underlying data sources efficiently.
Chapter 4 discusses the data source and data model concepts, explaining how to choose the most suitable database for any scenario. We’ll learn how to install and configure the SQL Server instance that we’ll use as the web API’s main data source throughout the rest of the book. Last but not least, we’ll introduce the object relational mapper (ORM) and learn how to use Entity Framework Core (EF Core) to deal with our data source in a structured, standardized, and strongly typed fashion.
The skills we learned in chapter 4 will come into play in chapter 5, where we’ll see how to perform SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE queries with EF Core, as well as handle different requests by using HTTP GET, POST, PUT and DELETE methods. We’ll also learn to implement typical web API features such as paging, sorting, and filtering, using data-transfer objects (DTOs) to exchange JSON data with the client.