The Best .NET REST API Client You Didn't Know About

The easy way to make HTTP requests in .NET is to use the HttpClient to send those requests. And it's a great abstraction to work with, especially with the methods supporting JSON payloads and responses. Unfortunately, it's easy to misuse the HttpClient. Port exhaustion and DNS behavior are some of the most common problems. Enter Refit: the automatic type-safe REST library for .NET Core. In this video, I'll show you how to use Refit to easily integrate with an HTTP API.

The Right Way To Use HttpClient In .NET

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Chapters
0:00 GitHub API integration with HttpClient
4:54 Replacing HttpClient with Refit
10:03 Creating a PATCH endpoint with Refit

[ahmedrizk]

that bright screen warning 0.1s before the bright screen is a scam 😂 ... Great video as always Milan ❤👏

[GeorgiosNtomoras]

Loved the way you compare the traditional with the modern way of doing things. Thank you for sharing this

[xavier.xiques]

The Refit implementation is the same as used in FeignClients, in Spring Boot applications for example.
Love it.
Thanks for the video Milan.

[Rob_III]

What do you all use for a (thread-safe) token delegating handler which refreshes the token when expires?

[enricoroselino]

a bit OOT but github use int for user id, then what do you think about userid better use int or uuid (or some sort) ? or its depend on the usage ?

[jimgilmartin]

What about error handling using refit? If the api returns either a DTO on success and a different, error DTO on failure, along with the appropriate status code, what does that look like? In general I like returning error objects along with a 4xx status code, but handling them feels like a lot of work.

[MikkalYT]

Any ideas how to setup this with Autofac DI container? Searched web but I cannot see any sdk from refit to deal with, so probably some custom setup required

[davearkley]

Are you aware of a package which can generate a Refit client form an OpenApi spec (yaml - v3.0.1)?

[baranacikgoz]

Great video. But I wouldn't use an extra dependency just to shorten my code 2 lines. Thanks for sharing alternatives

[VoroninPavel]

Couple of downsides: Refit currently does not support streaming, and it's not AOT friendly. Both issues are tracked on github.

[JuanOG]

How would you implement caching for certain api endpoints in refit. I haven't seen any options for this. Best case scenario is that there is some attribute which will allow the refit client to be source generated with caching. But unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.

[joga_bonito_aro]

I said, ooh, I'm blinded by the lights
No, I can't sleep until I refactor the http
I said, ooh, I'm drowning in the lines
Oh, when I'm like this, refit is the one I trust
(Hey, hey, hey)

[cuachristine]

How much slower is the compilation because of source generation?

[rengstrom]

Disclaimer, watched the video without sound so maybe you covered this. :P But in the context of clean architecture, in which layer would you put the interface? Seems to me like I would need to have it in the infrastructure layer because I don't want to have models in my domain that is tightly coupled to an external dependency. So I'd need some adapter that uses this interface, fetches models and converts it into som dto in my domain.

[adamchubbuck]

@MilanJovanovicTech, a bit off topic, but are there any reasonably decent alternatives to Swagger’s UI?

[amierulbasyaryusoff]

Really nice library. Not yet try it. But, can it also handle http status also?

[vgwizardx]

Maybe for personal projects. But I couldn't see myself using this for production work projects.

[milutinke]

Ћао, одлична библиотека и видео.
Имам предлог, а то је да направиш додатни видео да покажеш како да се са Refit-ом и на пример са Polly-ем постигне поузданост, на пример ако неки захтев пукне, па да га пошаље поново.

1) the Async suffix is moreorless obsolete now ... there were reasons to name the methods like that, but you don't have to do that anymore.
2) you forgot cancellationtokens ...

[benjsoft]

Similar to FeignClient in Java/Springboot