As you might already know, a Native Web App following the Single-Page Application approach will roughly handle the client-server communication in the following way:

In our specific scenario, the index.html role is covered by the /Views/Index.cshtml view file that is returned by the Index action method within the HomeController; however, the base concept is still the same.

In case you're wondering about what these Async Data Requests actually are, the answer is simple--everything, as long as it needs to retrieve data from the server, which is something that most of the common user interactions will normally do, including (yet not limited to) pressing a button to show more data or to edit/delete something, following a link to another action view, submitting a form, and so on. That is, unless the task is so trivial--or it involves a minimal amount of data--that...

Now that we have a clear vision of the request/response flow and its main actors, we can start building something. Our client doesn't even exist yet, but we can easily guess what we need to build it up--a set of CRUD methods for each one of the entries we identified early.

If we already used ASP.NET MVC at least once, we already know that the most straightforward way to do that is to create a dedicated Controller for each entry type. However, before adding each one of them, it can be wise to create the corresponding ViewModel so that it can handle the entry data in a strongly-typed fashion.

We might as well start with the flagship entry of our application, which will also be the most...

Now that we know the trick, we can add a bunch of other ViewMode and Controller pairs, one for each entry type we came up with earlier. In order to avoid repetition we'll skip the create file part and jump directly to the source code for each one of them, while also adding some useful hints where we need to.

What will a quiz be without some questions? Here's how we can deal with the QuestionViewModel.cs file that we need to add within the /ViewModels/ folder:

using Newtonsoft.Json; 
using System; 
using System.Collections.Generic; 
using System.ComponentModel; 
using System.Linq; 
using System.Threading.Tasks; 
 
namespace TestMakerFreeWebApp.ViewModels 
{ 
    [JsonObject(MemberSerialization...

In Chapter 1, Getting Ready, we acknowledged the fact that the ASP.NET Core pipeline has been completely rewritten in order to merge the MVC and WebAPI modules into a single, lightweight framework to handle both worlds. Although this is certainly a good thing, it comes with the usual downside that we need to learn a lot of new stuff. Handling routes is a perfect example of this, as the new approach defines some major breaking changes from the past.

The first thing we should do is to give out a proper definition of what routing actually is.

To cut it simple, we can say that URL routing is the server-side feature that allows a web developer to handle HTTP requests pointing to URIs not mapping...

Our updated QuizController class gives us a way to retrieve a single Quiz entry; it will definitely be very useful when our users will select one of them within the Latest list, as we'll be able to point them to something similar to a detail page. It will also be very useful when we'll have to deal with CRUD operations such as Delete and Update.

We're not dealing with the client-side code yet, so we don't know how we'll present such a scenario to the user. However, we already know what we'll eventually need, a Get, Put, Post, and Delete method for each one of our entries--Quizzes, Questions, Answers, and Results--as we'll definitely have to perform these operations for all of them.

Luckily enough, we don't need to implement them now. However, since we're working with these Controllers, it can be a good time...