Open brower from API

ANB 181

My customer calls my Net Core API passing some parameters and after run those, I need to open a browser on his/her computer with some html returning from the API call.
How can I do it ?

Thx

AgaveJoe 26,191 Reputation points

2022-09-29T14:52:11.593+00:00

Your question is not clear. What is a Net Core API? A class library? Web API? What kind of application are you building?

2 answers

Michael Taylor 47,806 Reputation points

2022-09-29T15:59:29.353+00:00

You cannot do that. An API has no UI and is not even being called by a browser necessarily. Opening the browser has to be done by the code that calls your API. What you should probably do is identify the URL that you want the client to navigate to. Whether that is part of your existing data or passed as an HTTP header depends on what you're doing. Nevertheless the client that called your API is then responsible for opening a browser window to that URL. Your API cannot do that itself.
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ANB 181 Reputation points

2022-09-29T16:20:17.097+00:00

Even though this API run on Net 6 ?
I thought somehow my API could have API Controllers but also MVC Controllers.
Adding services.AddControllersWithViews() and also dependency services.AddTransient<MyMvcController, MyMvcController>() in program.cs

Then the API Controller would call the MVC Controller and the MVC present its View.
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Michael Taylor 47,806 Reputation points

2022-09-29T16:26:00.507+00:00

Yes your web app can have both API endpoints and MVC endpoints that display views. But when you say your customer calls your API that indicates they aren't using your UI. They are using an HTTP client on their side to call your API to get some data. You cannot do anything on the client machine in that case.

Now if the customer is navigating to your web apps pages then you can send a redirect request back when they go to specific URLs to have the browser redirect to another URL instead. But this won't open a separate browser instance. If you need that behavior then, again, you would return the desired URL as part of your data. The client side Javascript code that calls your API would then need to get the URL and then use window.open to open a new tab/window. In all cases the client is responsible for opening the browser window. All an API can do is return the URL to go to.

AgaveJoe 26,191 Reputation points

2022-09-29T19:40:04.997+00:00

A web server cannot open an application on a user's machine. The user's machine must open the application whether that is the actual user or a desktop application the user installed.
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