/ CODING, ASPNETCORE

Automatically generating Typescript API clients on build with NSwag

TL;DR

Want to know how you can generate and compile up to date Typescript API clients each time you build your solution? Take a look at this example on GitHub.

Want to generate a C# client, check out this post

Background

When you create an API using aspnetcore it is very easy to add a Swagger endpoint and SwaggerUI for exploring and testing your API. Once you have Swagger enabled you can also use the information Swagger exposes about your API to generate clients for the enpoints and operations your aspnet controllers expose.

With NSwag you can generate client code without having your API running, many generators require the swagger.json file that is exposed when you run your API but NSwag doesn’t.

In this blogpost I will show you how to configure Swagger an NSwag so that up to date API clients are generated and compiled each time you build your solution. These clients can be packaged and published through NuGet for easy access to your API’s.

Configure Swagger and SwaggerUI with NSwag

First add the NSwag.AspNetCore NuGet package to your API project:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>netcoreapp3.1</TargetFramework>
    <AssemblyName>Example.Api</AssemblyName>
    <RootNamespace>Example.Api</RootNamespace>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <Folder Include="wwwroot\" />
  </ItemGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
  <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.NewtonsoftJson" Version="3.1.9" />
  <PackageReference Include="NSwag.AspNetCore" Version="13.8.2" />
  <PackageReference Include="NSwag.MSBuild" Version="13.8.2">
    <PrivateAssets>All</PrivateAssets>
  </PackageReference>
</ItemGroup>

</Project>

Next add the following code to your Startup.cs:

// This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
  // .....
    services
      .AddControllers()
      .AddNewtonsoftJson();

    services.AddSwaggerDocument(settings =>
    {
        settings.PostProcess = document =>
        {
            document.Info.Version = "v1";
            document.Info.Title = "Example API";
            document.Info.Description = "REST API for example.";
        };
    });
    //.....
}

// This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to configure the HTTP request pipeline.
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env)
{
    // .....
    // Enable the Swagger UI middleware and the Swagger generator
    app.UseOpenApi();
    app.UseSwaggerUi3();
    // .....
}

This is enough for a basic Swagger configuration, if you run your aspnetcore API project and navigate to http://<host>:<port>/swagger you will see SwaggerUI. This will also expose a swagger.json document at http://<host>:<port>/swagger/v1/swagger.json describing your API.

For more elaborate examples or explanation on how to configure NSwag have a look at the documentation for configuring the aspnetcore middleware.

Generate API clients with NSwag

Next setup a separate Clients project (or whatever you want to name it) and add the NSwag.MSBuild NuGet packages to your API project. We will use this package to generate the code for our API clients after the project is build, this way we regenerate our client code every time you build your project.

There are 2 things you need to add to your API project file to configure this:

  • a PackageReference to NSwag.MSBuild inside a ItemGroup
  • a custom Target that runs after the Build target with a Condition. This target will invoke nswag.exe using an nswag.json config file to generate the required code.

Your project file has to look something like this:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>netcoreapp3.1</TargetFramework>
    <AssemblyName>Example.Api</AssemblyName>
    <RootNamespace>Example.Api</RootNamespace>
  </PropertyGroup>
.....

  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.NewtonsoftJson" Version="3.1.9" />
    <PackageReference Include="NSwag.AspNetCore" Version="13.8.2" />
    <PackageReference Include="NSwag.MSBuild" Version="13.8.2">
      <PrivateAssets>All</PrivateAssets>
    </PackageReference>
  </ItemGroup>

  <Target Name="NSwag" BeforeTargets="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(TF_BUILD)'!='True'">
    <Exec 
      ConsoleToMSBuild="true" 
      ContinueOnError="true" 
      Command="$(NSwagExe_Core31) run nswag.json /variables:...">
      <Output TaskParameter="ExitCode" PropertyName="NSwagExitCode"/>
      <Output TaskParameter="ConsoleOutput" PropertyName="NSwagOutput" />
    </Exec>

    <Message Text="$(NSwagOutput)" Condition="'$(NSwagExitCode)' == '0'" Importance="low"/>
    <Error Text="$(NSwagOutput)" Condition="'$(NSwagExitCode)' != '0'"/>
  </Target>
  </Project>

Note that the condition Condition="'$(TF_BUILD)'!='True'" is specific to Azure DevOps. This condition ensures that the client code not regenerated. I use this in my Azure DevOps builds so that the version of the code that is in source control is used instead of being regenerated. You can use any environment variable while running MSBuild. So if you are using a different CI system which sets a different environment variable you can use that instead. Else you can introduce your own MSBuild variable in the PropertyGroup and pass that to dotnet.exe using /p:MyVar=False

The NSwag target is configured to log the output of nswag.exe as MSBuild messages. If the exit code is anything but 0 and Error message will be logs. It took me a while to figure this out but this way you can see in your MSBuild output why nswag.exe is failing.

The easiest way to create a nswag.json config file is by using NSwagStudio which you can install on Windows using an MSI you can find here or you can take the nswag.json file from my example repository on github and make modifications in that.

Below are the most important properties for this example (get the full nswag.json file here):

{
  "runtime": "NetCore31",
  "documentGenerator": {
    ...
  }  
  "codeGenerators": {
    "openApiToTypeScriptClient": {
      ...
      "template": "Angular", //generate an Angular specific client 
      "promiseType": "Promise", //use Promises
      "httpClass": "HttpClient", //use the Angular HttpClient
      ...
      "injectionTokenType": "InjectionToken", //use InjectionToken to configure the baseURL
      "rxJsVersion": 6.0,
      "dateTimeType": "OffsetMomentJS", //use MomentJS for timestamps
      ...
      "output": "$(TypescriptOutputPath)/api.generated.clients.ts"
    }
  }
}

When the clients are generated you still have to add a way for them to authenticate. In Angular you can do this with an HttpInterceptor:

...
@Injectable()
export class TokenInterceptor {

/**
 * Creates an instance of TokenInterceptor.
 * @memberof TokenInterceptor
 */
constructor() {}

/**
 * Intercept all HTTP request to add JWT token to Headers
 * @param {HttpRequest<any>} request
 * @param {HttpHandler} next
 * @returns {Observable<HttpEvent<any>>}
 * @memberof TokenInterceptor
 */
intercept(request: HttpRequest<any>, next: HttpHandler): Observable<HttpEvent<any>> {
    console.debug('appending bearer token to request:', request)
    request = request.clone({
       setHeaders: {
          Authorization: `Bearer ${"<get your access token here"}`
       }
    });

    return next.handle(request);
  }
}

Now build the Api project to generate the clients and contracts and the build your Client project. All that is left to do is to package your Client project as a NuGet package and share it with the users of your API. Having the Client project in the same solution as your aspnetcore API allows you to automatically build and publish up to date clients for your API.

A fully working example is available on GitHub. If you encounter issues with this example create an issue on that repository or leave a comment here.

Want to generate a C# client, check out this post

NOTE 1: There is no need to put the generated Typescript code into a .csproj. I merely did that here so that both the C# and Typescript examples look similar. If you, for example, serve an Angular app from your ASP.Net Core application you can can generate the Typescript client inside the angular project instead so that you have fully typed access to your API.

NOTE 2: I used to do this the other way around, meaning that the Client project contained the NSwag MSBuild target. This caused quite some build errors when concurrently building because the Client project had an implicit dependency on the Api project. So I decided to swap it around and make the Api project generate the code into the Client project instead.

Theoretically the generated code can get out of sync when the Client project builds before the Api project. But, to generated a changed client you will always have to modify the Api project first to add or modify some Controller. So as soon as you compile those changes the Client project will be updated. In short, this should never happen in practice. There is an MSBuild “trick” to ensure the correct build order without adding an assembly reference to the Api project but as said, you shouldn’t need that. *

Credits

Cover photo by unsplash-logodarylgio agoncillo