Getting User Data (Part 2) - A TimCo Retail Manager Video 

Part 1 and Part 2 of the "Getting User Data" videos have really broadened my understanding of C#, APIs and applications. Seeing these projects separated, the API calls being made, the queries to the database, objects being passed around and their methods being called, that's experience that I haven't gotten from any other course I've taken. At least not at this scale, where there are multiple projects involved, and so many factors to take into consideration. Even the debugging sessions have been super informative. Your videos are (from a learning standpoint) the best videos I've seen on RU-vid. I don't know how many times I will thank you throughout this playlist, but I will continue to do so regardless of how many times I've already said it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for creating these vids. We may not be a numerous bunch viewing but we are certainly rooting for your success.soon this will be a reference for other newbs

Thanks! The Series is incredibly informative. Definitely looking forward to getting through the rest.

WOW!!! this is getting a LOT MORE COMPLEX!, probably will have to watch this video twice to understand/digest all the information.

quote of the year "Make it public" .Love your style by the way.

How Is Tim Switching Between Files So Quickly? At 23:00 I got a little confused as to how Tim was navigating around so quickly. So for everyone else who doesn't know if you hold ctrl and click on an element it will take to straight to the definition. Alternatively, you can put your cursor inside the element and press F12. Hopefully, someone finds this useful :)

Great part of whole tutorial. I jump to next one :)

Great episode Tim, thanks - took me 3 attempts to finish due to distractions, but finally got there this morning :)

The answer to my question in last video is the first thing in this video. Thanks for answering it Tim! :)

Great video and project. Thanks a lot and keep it up!

Excellent Video!

Hi Tim, here a big fan. Compliments. With the issue regarding api/user in stead of /user I have fixed while the application was still running. This worked and I was very pleased with it. So you don't have to stop the application, make the fix and then start again.

Awesome job as always! I am learning a lot through this about building out an API as I build one for my job's data access. Just a few quick thoughts: @21:16 - AuthenticatedUser is still in the TRMDesktopUI.Models namespace (notice IAPIHelper's using statement for AuthenticatedUser). Nit-picky, I know. @29:00 - Yes, DefaultRequestHeaders.Clear() does clear everything under DefaultRequestHeaders, including Accept. @39:40 - You can Ctrl+. to get the option to 'Pull to interface' so you don't have to manually copy & paste into the file. Very handy! editted to remove answered question in video.

Watching this great tutorial so far, I'd recommend adding folders for the solutions, since they're becoming many and could get confusing to some. Solutions folders names as API, UI, Database etc would be great way to organise the project even more.

Great Job Tim, I almost got lost, I managed to get back in track. FYI I couldn't use the "token" from inside our APIHelpers, instead only from LoggedInUserModel. Either way, it works.

Hi Tim, thanks for the great course, I am enjoying the journey. Two suggestions from my side: 1. one section that would help me in this journey would be a small overview of what we have done so far where we stand and what we will do in this video and what will be the next steps. Sometimes I get lost in the details and am not aware of what exactly we are doing and how it fits into the larger picture. 2.I would appreciate some kind of challenge, it should not be too hard, but it should make the users try to think through a small solution themselves. Ok that's it, keep up the great work!

Love the series! As a great way to improve and teach. It would be a fantastic idea to add a tiny bonus tip in each video for "Did you know?" types of things. For instance where to add custom code snippets, or keyboard shotcuts that could speed up your coding. I know you have a couple of videos for tips & tricks, but this I feel like could help either remind or teach people watching your videos! :)

We're starting to have a number of projects in the solution and they all start with TMRD, some 2 of them end in library.. it's hard to identify things quickly.. I would suggest adding solution folders to the solution to at least break the API from the front end. The solution folders don't affect namespace but are great for organizing groups of projects together.

Hey Tim, great series! I've been seeing it the last week or so and it is great to see how all of this teaches so many things at once, even if it's just something "minor" like fixing typo mistakes. Now one thing I ask myself is, what would be a reason to have the separate calls for logging in and than a second call for getting user data? I mean, obviously to keep thing cleanly and structured it would make sense in some way... But why wouldn't someone call for a login request to the API and then with that call, get the user data back? Since, if your call returns a success response it'd probably mean already that the user was logged in successfully and you could then fetch the data from the response as well and you wouldn't have to keep track of two sperate models, but only the one user instance itself. I hope it makes sense :) Thx for all the great posts and hard work! Greetings from Germany

Hi Tim, thanks for this series. It's nice to see a programmers mind at work. I've started watching these to keep me company during the lonely lockdown home office hours. I've tagged along with my own hobby project using this as a reference. I did however start with Net 5, figuring things out myself which don't match the old 4.x Framework ways. One issue I had was the unability to access my user API with the token (401 - Unauthorized). The API is available on both http & https (via redirect), turns out that the issue only exists when I go to the API via http (I guess the token gets lost during the redirect?). I also passed the authorization header to the httpclient in a different way: _apiClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Bearer", token);. Anyhow just wanted to share this info for others who might end up with similar issues.

Thanks for a great video. I know that I am a whole year behind in this but I noticed a small thing that I thought was a bit weird. It looked to me as one of the using statements in the APIHelper refers to TRMDesktopUI.Models but it works anyway. I then realized that you forgot to change the namespace when you moved AuthenticatedUser.cs between projects.

Tim, I love you man. This is the best tutorial series on RU-vid. I am just became a Patreon supporter TODAY. I am late to the game with this series. Will I be able to download this solutions still? I read a comment in the previous video that the code was no longer available. I will be honest. I'm a lone ranger and I've been writing ASP.Net VB for 20 years. My code is horrible. I want to rewrite my web site in C# using your project as a template for "how you SHOULD do things". I know this is not a web project, but most of the framework you created here applies. Using your code as a starting point will mean I don't have to go back to vid 1 and write the code myself as you show on screen. Thanks for this. I've learned more from these videos than I could ever have learned trying to piece together a hundred how-to vids on specific items. I can't believe how awesome this series is.

I'm going back watching all of these and I just accidentally happened to turn on closed captioning and I'm dying...at 26:51, it thinks Tim said "stepped on ourself our own TOAST" lol. :p

Hey Tim, great series, i was just wondering if there was an overview/preview/course introduction of the MVC add on for the tournament tracker series, just so i could see what would be achieved in the course as i am interested in seeing where we can take the design when using MVC, many thanks

Out of interest is there any reason not to have some kind of singleton LoggedInUserHolder class which just references the LoggedInUserModel? It would allow you to just assign the new user rather than do a prop by prop update. It'd also let you set up your events and property change notifications on that one central property. Whereas now you'll either trigger events on every property update, have to pick some kind of canonical property that triggers the events or manually call some kind of method to drive the events all of which would be error prone IMO.

Hi Tim! Thank you for the good job you do, you are very educational and explain everything slowly and well. I have a thought, the easiest and best way to build authentication into a WPF application, is it to create a web api that you have done in this series?

Hello Tim, Thanks for the brilliant content you are putting on youtube! Great stuff! My question is about the naming conventions of class fields - is it not considered a bad practice to name fields, starting with an underscore? Now I understand that your point here might be not to use the "this" keyword in order to setup the properties for the relevant fields, but anyways when I've learnt naming conventions for C# the best practice states to name fields with camel case, the same as variables. Please let me know your opinion and does that naming come due to your experience as a developer ? Thanks in advance!

Hi Tim, thanks for the great content. About copying all the properties from the LoggedInUserModel to the singleton object. Just my thoughts: isn't it more useful to create a Clone() function in the LoggedInUserModel that returns a new LoggedInUserModel? So things stay together and it's almost impossible to forget copying properties as you're in the model itself. public LoggedInUserModel Clone() { return new LoggedInUserModel { Id = this.Id, ... }; }

Hi Tim, your videos are great and really helpful. I'm just getting started and I'm also reading the book Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin. In your solution the API Project uses an object (for example the user object) and the DesktopUI also uses a different user object. Where should I create the entities which build the domain of the whole project? They build the core and should be reusable in all projects. Should I create for example a TRMLibrary with all these entities or do I miss something?

@IAMTimCorey, in this video your public async Task GetLoggedInUserInfo(string token) method in the APIHelper class doesn't seem to return anything yet it still works. I can only get mine working by returning the local _loggedInUser object. What am I missing? Thanks in advance!

Presumably it would be better to do .Single() vs .First()? We're only expecting one entry for that user ID, if there's more than 1 entry - something is wrong somewhere... .Single() would allow us to discover the issue and handle the exception accordingly? Interested on your perspective on this!

When you move the API Helper to the library, you still use bootstrapper to get the resources you need for that class. But bootstrapper lives in DesktopUI. Wouldn't that be a dependency in the opposite direction?

Great series so far Tim. This could possibly be another video that you do at some other time. At around 8.00 minutes you mention that you could have done the TRMDataManager and Library as one solution and the TRMDesktopUI and Library as another solution. That leads me to wondering how would you join those two solutions together? If you made a change to the TMRDataManager solution and didn't need to make changes to the TRMDesktopUI solution how would you ensure that the TRMDesktopUI solution contains the newer version of the TRMDataManager solution?

Good lesson. My question is this. do you feel this entire section was right for a single git commit? Or could we have broken down the steps a bit more? Sometimes I don't think its possible because of all the things you had to change.

Great video as always. Wouldn't make it sense for UserModel in DataManager.Library and LoggedInUserModel in DesktopUI.Library to share an Interface together maybe in an TRM.Shared project? So you can make sure the names of the properties match and did not get changed only on one side.

Could we have used interfaces to help with the code duplication? I'm aware I'm late to the party here, lol. Just curios

There are two items that aren't quite bugs, but I believe they are not what you intended: 1. The class authenticatedUser.cs is in the wrong namespace. It is in the TRMDesktopUI.Models namespace instead of the TRMDesktopUI.Library.Models namespace which is where I think you intended to put it. 2. The call to apiClient.GetAsync("/api/User") in APIHelper executes the method GetById in the UserController. The GetById returns an instance of UserModel. After the call to apiClient.GetAsync("/api/User") there's a call to ReadAsAsync . I believe that ReadAsAsync should return an instance of UserModel because that's what was returned from GetById, but it instead returns an instance of LoggedInUserModel. Since the UserModel class and the LoggedInUserModel are virtually identical, this is more of a semantic issue than an actual bug/error. The one caveat is that in order to correct this you need the TRMDesktopUI.Library to refer to the TRMDataManager.Library which I am not sure you want to do because it ties the libraries together. Am I correct that we should change the namespace for issue number 1 and return the UserModel from ReadAsAsync for issue number 2? Thanks

Would it be beneficial to refactor the user properties onto an interface shared between the frontend and backend? Is that valuable if it only serves to reduce the property duplication?

I was surprised to see that TRMDesktopUI.Library APIHelper's constructor initializing ILoggedInUserModel using DI. I guess you don't need to explicitly use DI in each library and can figure out from singleton setups.

I ran into an issue where the API call to /api/User returned a list, but it seemed that it returned a single object in this video. I just changed my code to handle the list and use the first object (in this case LoggedinUserModel) in the list if there were any. If I missed this in the video I apologize.

Where is a good place to write complex logic? The Backend library or the UI library? If we have to read data from DB and do some complex calculations before the result is shown in the UI, the server could just pass the raw data to the UI library which does the calculation or the server can do the calculation and pass just the result to the UI. Which is better?

Firstly Tim, thanks for the great tutorial videos. Could you in a future video explain the system architecture, in particular the API calls. Currently we have two databases, one which we use to create accounts with and another for our retail management system (which also stores our logged in user). My problem with this architecture is that we authenticate the user through the cloud but we then have to call the TRM database to retrieve the authenticated user details. Ignoring we haven't as yet resolved how we will duplicate the account to our TRM database, should the web API access our TRM database at all? I logically would think these databases would be on separate servers and we shouldn't have a dependency across the two, due to security, etc. And if you do have time, I would like to here your opinion why you have used Entity Framework to create the Web API but use Dapper for TRM database?

Hi Tim, just wondering for the model sharing. Why don't we have a single library class that supplies the most basic data (like UserModel), then the DesktopUI or TRMDataManager inherit on the class and add changes based on their needs? They having different purpose but they should also using the same model. So, we should can have the code sharing and also certain level of code separation.

Hi Tim, was the response intentionly mapped to LoggedInUserModel even if the API return a UserModel (just because the JSON mapper can resolve it since they have relativly the same properties by returning null on token) or was it just a little unseen bug. thank you for the series, realy enjoying it.

Wouldn't it be also good to add the AuthenticatedUserModel as a singleton?

Hey Tim, quick question about your decision (at 3:27) to change GetById() to return a single UserModel rather than a list of them. By requesting the ".First()" item in the list aren't we risking a crash if it comes back empty? We're assuming that the logged in Identity/User's Id exists in the register's Users table, which it feasibly might not. What would be the best way to protect against this eventuality, if you feel it's even worthwhile? Also, a huge thank you for this resource you've put together.

~10:11 When you populate the LoggedInUserModel by copy/paste the UserModel properties. If you had an interface IUserModel in your Data Access Library, would it be okay to implement that into LoggedInUserModel and then add any additional properties as needed??

Can you show web api punished to iis and consumer from the ui. Token api itself has failed when I tried.

Might it be better to separate the Models that both the UI and API are using into a common model project. That way the data access is still independent of the UI but the models are still shared. The common model could be held within another object holding data that is specific to the UI. Or the UI model could inherit from the common model.

Hi Tim, Great video as always! I have a question; In the GetLoggedInUserInfo method when you do the manual mapping of the result, would it not be possible to just assign result directly to "_loggedInUserModel" seeing that they have the same type? I seems to me like the mapping is unnecessary, or am I missing something?

Here you pass a string as a parameter from the UI to the server to get the user details. But what if we had to pass an object as a parameter? The the object definition should be available in the UI library and the server library?

Hi Tim. At around 12:50 you speak about MVC and use the term Front-End Model. Is this the same as a ViewModel?

Hi Tim, really enjoying the series. I've hit a snag, when I run the solution, the web api opens in my browser. But the Login screen is not showing up. I don't see any issues in the debugger screen. Any suggestions on where to look to figure out why Login screen isn't showing?

When we didn't get the data (the false on GetAsync) I was still getting 404... it turned out I'd accidentally inserted a space between User and its / in that call. Is it better practice to not have the trailing slash when building an API?

In the APIHelper code this returns "true" and you're authorized... apiClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("Authorization", $"Bearer { token }"); and this returns "false" and you're not... apiClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("Authorization", $"Bearer{ token }"); in other words check the space between Bearer and token in your code.

As fas as I understand, Data, DataManager and its library would be the server, and DesktopUI and its library would be the clients if you implement this as 'server with multiple clients'. Am I right? Would you need to do adaptations to the code to make it work that way?

This is gonna be an ongoing comment I'll edit as I watch: 1) I actually thought it's smarter to interface everything, return an IEnumarble and ditch the .First(). 2) Wouldn't it be better to extract an interface from UserModel for reuse in DesktopUI.Library? What are the dangers of sharing an interface across the projects? 3) Finding the right references manually is a major headache, praise the Ctr + . 4) * Points back at 2) with a grin *

Hey Tim, I am getting an "Internal Server Error" as my response from HttpResponseMessage response = await apiClient.GetAsync("/api/User"). I checked my spacing around the $"Bearer {token} and my spelling of Authorization. Any idea where the error could lie?

I am not sure if you changed the namespace in AuthenticatedUser class from 'SRMDesktopUI.Models' to 'SRMDesktopUI.Library.Models'. Maybe that's more logical.

Why did you map each property seperately and not just assigned the whole result to the _loggedInUser? (38:00)

Great video as always! I got the "Unauthorized" error! I used break point and it still can access and get the token for the login part, but then it could not access to get other information using that token (Noted that I used another url not my localhost)! What should I do Tim?

Tim - Thanks for the content, I've been following along with the series, however, when I try to run the api I'm getting a "Parser Error", where it could not load type TRMDataManager.WebApiApplication There's a Source Error: Line 1: I've done the Googling and suggestions were to use Dapper.StrongName, or remove the Global.asax.cs file..I used the StrongName, and it worked, so there a big enough difference between Dapper and Dapper.StrongName?

First off, great video series! Being new to programming, this series has been very helpful!! I'm getting an error when I run the application at the end of this video above the username: "An error occurred while sending the request". I've been trying to figure this out for several days now and can't seem to find what I'm doing wrong. Any idea what I'm doing wrong??

Hi @IAmTimCorey I was wondering how we can pass the current logged in users details to another Screen, I'm thinking along the lines of passing instance of ApiHelper to the second view ("Screen") and then retrieving current logged in user through that. But the problem I'm having is how do I find the current users token to pass in to GetLoggedInUser info method without having to re-authenticate the user post log-in? Any help would be much appreciated!

Hi, I'm a big fun of those courses. Thanks Tim! I followed up to this tutorial, but in a login form I got an error "an error ocurred while sending the request", actually I do not even know where to look up in a code right now, so much behind already. Tried debug this error, could not find it, where is the problem in my side. Maybe it's kinda typo error by me, or need to look somewhere else. Anyone please could help me.

It seems worrying that in the UI Library, we are importing stuff from UI (e.g. AuthenticatedUser), whereas in UI, we are importing stuff from UI Library (IAPIHelper). Isn't this a circular dependency, or am I missing something?

I noticed a container is used in this section. How does this relate to containers you mentioned in your video regarding creating containers using Docker?

Hi Tim, I have to admit that using frameworks makes me confused. If I understand Calibrun.Micro, it helps to bring the different WPF parts together by relying on syntax convention. When I launch the app I get a null value for the _loggedInUser variable. The programme goes through the constructor, but I don't really understand what gives the loggedInUser value in the constructor. I believe it comes from the container of the dependency injection with .Singleton(). Could you please tell me a little bit more? I don't think I've missed any step.

Thanks for another great video. Just wondering how string api = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["api"]; in TRMDesktopUI.Library.Api.APIHelper InitializeClient method gets value from app.config in TRMDesktopUI? These are different projects and appSetings not even exists in TRMDesktopUI.Library.

Mine returns an error "Sequence contains no elements " at this Line - return data.GetUserById(userId).First(); in the UserController file, and a userId is returned still ?? Pls Help Tim!!

Why I'm i getting this error cannot deserialize the current JSON array (e.g. [1,2,3]) into type...?

hi tim. I'm writing right, I'm running into an error called. " The object reference is not set to an instance of an object" I get all my data but now I press continue. comes the message in text TextBlock x:Name="ErrorMassage". Is it a natural mistake or I have to look closely. One more question is the possibility of running it all together in Database instead of 2. totally delicious work you do. it teaches me a lot here in Denmark Sincerely Michael Schannong

why am I getting back "CreatedDate": "0001-01-01T00:00:00" getutcdate() but in the database I have 4/28/2020 1:18:09 AM (the correct one) above has January first year 1

Someone got a "bad request" mess after giving the credentials?

Copy, paste, errors, correct, very confused now.

My AcessToken is getting null with status code 401 Unauthorized after updating api/user. Why it might be?

While trying to use the login page, I get the following error. I've tried troubleshooting all morning and can't seem to get the login screen to work. This is the error I receive when I click the login button: {System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException: An error occurred while sending the request. ---> System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel. Did anyone else get this error?

And this is where I am going to disagree. The reason you have duplication, because your remote API infrastructure and your persistence are sprinkled with your domain. But great lesson anyway :)

why every video start with Zero Git Changes?

I'm getting the Exeption"Cannot deserialize the current JSON array (e.g. [1,2,3]) into type 'RMDesktopUI.Library.Model.LoggedInUserModel' because the type requires a JSON object (e.g. {\"name\":\"value\"}) to deserialize correctly. To fix this error either change the JSON to a JSON object (e.g. {\"name\":\"value\"}) or change the deserialized type to an array or a type that implements a collection interface (e.g. ICollection, IList) like List that can be deserialized from a JSON array. JsonArrayAttribute can also be added to the type to force it to deserialize from a JSON array. Path '', line 1, position 1."