Official Website of Ryan Olshan: Technology

Role-based authentication in Lullaby

Ryan Olshan — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Lullaby 1.0 RC3 introduced role-based authentication. Using role-based authentication, you can further restrict access to a REST service or REST method by a role using the AllowedRoles property of the RequireAuthentication attribute.

[RequireAuthentication(AllowedRoles = "User,Admin")]

If using an authentication provider, Lullaby will check against the roles returned from the provider. If using forms authentication, it will invoke IsUserInRole.

Lullaby 1.0 RC3 Released

Ryan Olshan — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:53:12 GMT

Lullaby 1.0 RC3 is now released and can be downloaded here. RC3 is the last release candidate. The next release will be the final 1.0 release and will contain bug fixes only as RC3 is feature complete.

Changes:

Fixed bug where security tokens were being added to the cache even though a previous security token was issued for a user
Added role-based security

ReSharper License Giveaway

Ryan Olshan — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:50:00 GMT

ReSharper is one of my favorite add-ins for Visual Studio. I'll be giving away 2 ReSharper licenses (retail price $199) during my session at the Silicon Valley Code Camp this Saturday and at upcoming speaking engagements.

Below is just a small example of the power of ReSharper.

Lullaby 1.0 RC2 Released

Ryan Olshan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:37:43 GMT

Lullaby 1.0 RC2 is now released and can be downloaded here.

Changes:

Fixed bug that prevented URI template matches from being found across multiple assemblies
Added support for forms authentication
Added feature to exclude a REST method from cache by class or method

Not At PDC

Ryan Olshan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:55:00 GMT

For those of you not attending PDC, don't feel left out. Chris Love is organizing Not At PDC. The airfare, hotel, and registration is free and it's in every city across the US. The only thing to note is weather vary's by event, so please dress accordingly. I'll be submitting a session for Thursday and will be speaking on REST. See you at NotAtPDC.

For those of you not at PDC, or those that are we have started a thing today called Not At PDC. We are going to have live meeting sessions, links to Blogs, Podcasts and any other .NET related content featured this week. Right now we are trying to get things organized better. We will have a site live in the morning. If you want to schedule a session or something DM http://twitter.com/NotAtPDC.

SoCal Code Camp Presentations

Ryan Olshan — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 21:05:00 GMT

I had a great time at SoCal Code Camp and it was nice getting to catch up and meet with the local and out of town speakers and attendes. I had a couple of technical difficulties, but other than that my presentations went well.

You can download my presentations and sample code below.

Announcing Lullaby 1.0 RC1

Ryan Olshan — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:23:45 GMT

Lullaby, an extensible open source attribute-based framework for creating RESTful .NET services is now available for download as a release candidate. Lullaby 1.0 RC1 features include:

Authentication provider model
Cache provider model
Cache invalidation framework configurable by both attributes and an XML file
Extensible serialization framework
Search for URL template matches across multiple assemblies
Service URL routing using System.Web.Routing
Extensible API
Support for application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME type

Download binaries and documentation - http://ryanolshanrest.googlecode.com/files/Lullaby%201.0%20RC1.zip
Download documentation - http://ryanolshanrest.googlecode.com/files/Lullaby.pdf
Lullaby Google Group - http://groups.google.com/group/lullaby-rest

Change to RestClassAttribute and RestMethodAttribute

Ryan Olshan — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:33:00 GMT

Shortly after posting Handling POST and PUT methods with Lullaby, I started thinking about how the implementation dictating that the type the request stream is deserialized to is the REST methods enclosing type should be changed to have the option to be configured by the user. I made a change to RestClassAttribute and RestMethodAttribute that allows for this.

RestMethodAttribute.DeserializeRequestStream (System.Boolean) - This property allows the user to specify that the request stream should be deserialized. This is set to true by default for POST and PUT method requests.
RestMethodAttribute.DeserializationType (System.Type) - This property sets the type to deserialize the request stream to. If a value is not set for this property, then the request stream will be deserialized as the enclosed type of the REST method. Setting this property on the RestClassAttribute attribute will override the type to deserialize to for all REST methods in the REST class.

Handling POST and PUT methods with Lullaby

Ryan Olshan — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:49:00 GMT

UPDATE: See Change to RestClassAttribute and RestMethodAttribute.

When a POST or PUT method is sent to Lullaby, the request stream is deserialized to the type of the REST class that is currently being invoked and the REST method is invoked with the deserialized object. The REST method for a POST or PUT method needs to have one argument that is of the type of the enclosing REST class. Below is an example of a XML request stream and a simple Lullaby REST class and REST POST method.

<Address>
<AddressLine1>123 My Street</AddressLine1>
<AddressLine2>Suite 2</AddressLine2>
<City>Blahville</City>
<State>CA</State>
<Zip>90023</Zip>
</Address>

When the above request stream is deserialized to the below type of Address, the XML nodes will match up to their equivelent properties.

[RestClass]
public class Address
{
public int AddressID { get; set; }
public string AddressLine1 { get; set; }
public string AddressLine2 { get; set; }
public string City { get; set; }
public string State { get; set; }
public string Zip { get; set; }

[RestClass(HttpMethods.Method.POST)]
public Address CreateAddress(Address address)
{
//...
}
}

The address parameter in the CreateAddress method will be the result of the deserialized request stream.

For POST and PUT methods, a Content-Type header on the request must be specified. Lullaby.Serialization.SerializationTable handles routing of MIME types to serializers. By default, the following MIME types are mapped:

application/javascript
application/json
application/json+javascript
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
application/xml
text/javascript
text/xml

Using the serialization table, you can change how MIME types are mapped to serializers and add and remove MIME type mappings. For example, if you wanted to add a MIME type of application/blah and map it to a serializer of BlahSerializer, you would do the following (BlahSerializer must implement Lullaby.Serialization.ISerializer):

SerializationTable.Deserializers.Add("application/blah", (valueToSerializeToObject, type) => new BlahSerializer.Deserialize(valueToSerializeToObject, type));
SerializationTable.Serializers.Add("application/blah", (objectToSerialize) => new BlahSerializer.Serialize(objectToSerialize));

Lullaby 1.0 Beta 3 released

Ryan Olshan — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:24:24 GMT

Lullaby 1.0 Beta 3 is now released. You can download the latest version at http://code.google.com/p/ryanolshanrest. This release was released earlier than expected because of a bug that was discovered that prevented post and put method requests from working.

New Features

Service URL routing
OPTIONS method supported on service
Default serialization and caching provider don't have to be provided in web.config out of the box, but are still configurable in web.config
Support for application/x-www-form-urlencoded requests
XML comments are now generated for the assembly

Bugs Fixed

Fixed bug that prevented post and put method requests from working properly
Post method now sends 201 status code and Created status code description instead of 200/OK
Fixed bug where a trailing / in some URI templates was causing issues

Lullaby now includes a CHM help file for API documentation.