This post was originally published here

When you create a Web API you can use it for your own applications but maybe you also want to expose it to the outside world. In that case you probably want to change the behavior of the Web API. For example add security or hide properties. You can use BizTalk to create a virtual service in front of your Web API to modify the behavior but is that the smartest choice?  Because BizTalk writes every message that it receives a couple of times to the MessageBox database. This increases heavily the execution time and especially with Web APIs it’s important to have a really low execution time!

Another option is to use Sentinet from Nevatech to create a virtual service in front of your Web API.
The virtual service runtime in Sentinet can also be extended with custom messages processing. Sentinet provides a number of build-in message processing components but it is also possible to create custom message processing components.

Let’s have a look at the following example where an Order Web API is used inside an organization to process orders. This Web API must also be exposed to external customers to show the status of an order but if an error occurs in the Web API or in a background process, the OrderStatus property must be modified that the order is still in progress and the ErrorMessage property with the error must not be shown to the customers. Furthermore the output of the Web API must be in XML instead of JSON.

Send request with Postman to Order Web API

The following steps in Sentinet are necessary to make it work:

  • Add the REST service (or API) to the the Sentinet Repository
  • Create a Virtual Service
  • Add custom Pipeline Processing
  • Test the Virtual REST Service

Sentinet makes it really easy to modify the response of a Web API. You only have to create a Virtual Service in front of it and add custom Pipeline Processing! Especially if you are already familiar with XPATH and XSLT, the example above doesn’t take long to implement.

Download:
Sentinet version 4.5