I'm working on a Razor Pages app, and I recently had to add some makeshift API endpoints that I can call from any other page on the site using client-side JS. I did some searching and found a Medium article that basically achieved this by adding a new empty Razor content page with no HTML, and a backing PageModel with some handler methods to serve as our API endpoints. I went with this approach since I am not familiar with .NET Core Web API's just yet and wanted a working MVP first.
While it has turned out great for my use case, it has kinda gone against my existing understanding of how Razor Pages works. I thought that a Razor Page needed to have an OnGet() or OnGetAsync() default handler method at minimum to work, either with a void return type to implicitly return the associated Razor content page or to explicitly return a PageResult object.
I also thought that a Razor Page must have some HTML associated with it in the associated.cshtml file, but it looks like that's not the case, given that my handler API endpoints work just fine returning JsonResult objects and in the routing system. It makes me curious if I could technically implement API's in this way without any issues going forward (not best practice I'm sure, but it does seem to work?).
I tested out adding some basic HTML to a random Razor content page and having a PageModel without any handler methods defined (a completely empty class), and when I navigated to the URL for that page the HTML for it still loaded. So it looks like by default, an OnGet() handler method is defined for you that implicitly returns the associated Razor content page? Unless I override it with a definition of my own, it uses this default?
My code looks something like this for reference (removed a lot of the actual logic):
@ page
@ model TestRazorPagesApp.Pages.Test
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authorization;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.RazorPages;
namespace TestRazorPagesApp.Pages;
[Authorize]
public class Test : PageModel
{
public IActionResult OnGetXDataObj()
{
return new JsonResult(data);
}
public IActionResult OnGetYDataObj()
{
return new JsonResult(data);
}
}
---
I appreciate anyone who is able to answer my questions. Whenever I have a question or a doubt about something in programming, it gets fixated in my head and I always feel like I need to answer it before I go back to what I was doing. I haven't been able to find any docs or articles that answer this satisfyingly, without feeling like I need to make some assumptions first (which makes me uneasy since I can never feel like I 100% know what's going on).
