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What's the best way to determine the base URL path at which a ServiceStack instance is running? For example, if I configure ServiceStack to run at the "/api" base URL in web.config, how do I get the string "/api"? I would like to get this value in order to construct URLs of arbitrary request DTOs, as HATEOAS style documentation.

For example, if I have a request DTO SomeRequest with a [Route("/someRequest")] attribute, the full URL of this request would be "/api/someRequest". The ToUrl extension method returns just part of the path below the base URL:

new SomeRequest().ToUrl() // returns "/someRequest"

I haven't found any easy way to do this. It seems that there are no config properties exposed by ServiceStack that return the "/api" base path value. Inspecting web.config to get the ServiceStack handler path might be possible with ServiceStack 4 but I'm having trouble figuring out how to do it with our current SS 3 configuration.

The Request.GetAbsolutePath() method will produce the full path of the current request, e.g. "/api/someRequest", and then I could maybe do some string comparison between this and the ToUrl() extension method to determine the base path, but that also seems like a pretty fragile solution.

Is there any better way to get this base URL?

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Mike Mertsock
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  • @Scott regarding the servicestack-bsd tag - we're going to use that instead of servicestack-v3? – Mike Mertsock Jan 15 '14 at 17:37
  • I did try [discussing this on meta](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210765/significant-platform-change-should-a-new-tag-be-created-servicestack). There was objection to a v3 specific tag in case stuff was relevant to versions less than 3 - though I don't think they really exist now. But BSD didn't seem offensive. I have been using it on new questions that explicitly apply to v3. – Scott Jan 15 '14 at 17:41
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    I think I like servicestack-bsd better anyway. Good to know. – Mike Mertsock Jan 15 '14 at 17:44

1 Answers1

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I would combat this issue by checking for the prefix in the ServiceStack AppHost config. From the v3 documentation:

In order to avoid conflicts with your existing ASP.NET web framework it is recommended to host your ServiceStack web services at a custom path. ...

The location configuration (to your root Web.config file) below hosts your webservices at custom path: /api

...

You also need to configure the root path in your AppHost.

So because ServiceStack expects you to configure it with the matching path like this in the AppHost:

public override void Configure(Container container)
{
    SetConfig(new EndpointHostConfig { ServiceStackHandlerFactoryPath = "api" });
}

You can access the value directly from ServiceStack's config.

In v3 it can be accessed from the Service using:

GetAppHost().Config.ServiceStackHandlerFactoryPath

In v4 you can use:

AppHost.Instance.Config.WebHostUrl

Obviously it would be handy if the UrlExtensions ToUrl() method already performed this check and prefixed accordingly.

As @esker notes the path will not include the leading slash, so it must be prefixed with / to be a valid static path.

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Scott
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    Turns out I didn't have `ServiceStackHandlerFactoryPath` set. Setting this to "api" allowed me to construct the URLs as you have shown. Also this fixes the URLs reported on the metadata pages. One thing to note: if you try to set a `ServiceStackHandlerFactoryPath` value with a leading slash, like "/api", the slash will be stripped out. So when generating URLs using this value, it may be necessary to prepend with "/". – Mike Mertsock Jan 15 '14 at 18:01
  • @esker That's a good point. I have added this note at the bottom. – Scott Jan 15 '14 at 18:13