Web API Introduction

Introduction

The SmartStore.Net Web API allows direct access to the data of an online store. It is build on the most recent technologies Microsoft offers for web based data consuming, the ASP.NET Web API and the OData provider. This documentation gives you an overview of how to build an API client, also known as API consumer. It uses C# code but you can build your consumer in any common programming language. As OData is a standardized protocol there are a lot of [frameworks and toolkits] frameworks-and-toolkits available for various platforms.

The ASP.NET Web API is a framework for building web APIs on top of the .NET framework. It uses HTTP as an application protocol (rather than a transport protocol) to return data based on the client requests. The Web API is able to return the data appropriately based on the media type specified with the request. By default it provides JSON and XML based responses.

The [Open Data Protocol (OData)] odata is a standardized web protocol that provides an uniform way to expose, structure, query and manipulate data using REST practices. OData also provides an uniform way to represent metadata about the data, allowing clients to know more about the type system, relationships and structure of the data.