Integrating the data from third parties API to a local database using .NET Core

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My question is regarding the clean architecture. I am quite new to .NET Core, and my assignment is to integrate a third-party API into the console app so the data is stored in a SQL database. I have been researching for the past two days, and I found so many examples of how to create a repository service querying a local database, but I cannot see any decent example of how to integrate the data from external APIs to a local data storage solution, SQL database in my case.

Any information on how to structure services in a clean manner would help me a lot!

dotnet-httpclient .net-core repository web-services
1 Answers

It basically boils down to the question whether you need to store locally data from a 3d party API. You are not the owner of that data.

In many cases it's better to query external API each time you need some data. You don't know if the data will change and when. E.g. you query each time weather data or currency convertion rate. External system knows how to produce such results, so ask the system each time. It's often ok to cache data from 3d party APIs, depending on the needs of your application (does your user needs weather updates with each refresh or once a day is enough, e.g. on a web site of a skiing area).

Now there can be cases when 3d party API is loosely coupled with your domain. E.g. you use a separate API to manage devices in a smart home solution. In this case we are talking about microservice architecture (Microservices by Fowler is a good start). It's OK in this case to build your local copy of the data from a 3d party API. Imaging your service is only interested in how often devices get replaced. So you may query device management API for broken devices and store this information locally in the form that is better for your application. You get data, reorganize it as it better fits you, store and use it.

So basically as always with such broad questions: it depends. On what are you building, on what external API provides, on what do you want to do with the data you query.

Going technical on your question: you query data e.g. via REST from a third party. This gets you TheirObjectDto. You process this data. Their object may change, you are not the owner of the contract. You create MyObject, which contains the data that you need. You save it to your DB (via repository, if you want). You build an Entity for it and DB table. When 3d party API changes and returns TheirObjectDto2 you still work with MyObject. Minimal change for you is to convert TheirObjectDto2 to MyObject. Your app continues working. In a second step if you want some new cool info of TheirObjectDto2 you modify your internal data structure.

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