Web API and Stored Procedures

I am building a web service that gets data via Stored Procedures from a db and provides the result as JSON. The solution is built as a MVC 4 Web API project. I have to retrieve the data via Stored Procedures for several reasons (security, SQLAnywhere db, etc).

It is a relatively small scale project so I have opted for not defining a Model in the Web Service layer to save work (and possibly performance). There will likely be models in the front end application (which will be a MVC 4 Web Application).

The reasons why I am including an extra layer in the form of a Web Service is to a) add extra security, and b) that there will likely be a iPhone app for part of the application which then can utilize the same web service as the site.

It is working as I want it to, so what I want feedback on is

• What do you think of the general approach to build a MVC 4 Web API solution without explicit models?

• Do you have any comments on how to improve the details of the implementation?

One potential thought I have had is to skip the dataset and make a direct call to the Stored Procedure and loop over a datareader, which could potentially be faster. The other potential change is to loop over the datatable and build up the JSON manually instead of using the serializer.

What I like about the current solution is that it can be done on very few lines of code and that I do not have to manually name each JSON object since it is inherited from the datatable within the dataset.

I define a dataset called dsProducts that is loaded with a TableAdapter.

```
// GET api/products
public string Get()
{

string result = "";

dsProductTableAdapters.GetProductsTableAdapter taTemp = new dsProductsTableAdapters.GetProductsTableAdapter();
dsProducts dsTemp = new dsProducts();

try {
taTemp.Fill(dsTemp.GetProducts);
result = jsonHelper.convertJSONString(dsTemp.GetProducts);
} catch (Exception ex) {
result = "{\"er

General approach to build Web API without models, doesn't give the full web API capabilities.

E.g:

• Help: You cannot have Web API help generated automatically.

• You cannot return error handling scenarios: status, message

If you don't want to create the DTOs (Models), you can use the dynamic types. JSON formatter works well with the dynamic types.

StackExchange Code Review Q#20526, answer score: 5