1. Configure your preferred database

Configure your .NET App with the OrmLite NuGet package of the RDBMS you want to use. SQLite is a great option to evaluate AutoQuery without any external dependencies:

Configure your App to use your database. We recommend using a Modular Startup configuration for the greater encapsulation and flexibility.

In this example we'll create a simple Todo table:

// Configure.Db.cs
using ServiceStack.Data;
using ServiceStack.OrmLite;
using ServiceStack.DataAnnotations;

[assembly: HostingStartup(typeof(MyApp.ConfigureDb))]

namespace MyApp;

public class Todo
{
    [AutoIncrement]
    public long Id { get; set; }
    public string Text { get; set; }
    public bool IsFinished { get; set; }
}

public class ConfigureDb : IHostingStartup
{
    public void Configure(IWebHostBuilder builder) => builder
      .ConfigureServices(services => 
          services.AddSingleton<IDbConnectionFactory>(
            new OrmLiteConnectionFactory("db.sqlite", SqliteDialect.Provider)));

        .ConfigureAppHost(appHost => {
            // Create and populate Todo Table if it doesn't exist:
            using var db = appHost.Resolve<IDbConnectionFactory>().Open();
            if (db.CreateTableIfNotExists<Todo>()) 
            {
                db.Insert(new Todo { Text = "Learn" });
                db.Insert(new Todo { Text = "AutoQuery" });
            }
        });
}

2. Configure AutoQuery

AutoQuery can then be enabled by registering the AutoQueryFeature plugin:

// Configure.AutoQuery.cs              
using ServiceStack;

[assembly: HostingStartup(typeof(MyApp.ConfigureAutoQuery))]

namespace MyApp;

public class ConfigureAutoQuery : IHostingStartup
{
    public void Configure(IWebHostBuilder builder) => builder
        .ConfigureAppHost(appHost => {
            appHost.Plugins.Add(new AutoQueryFeature {
                MaxLimit = 1000,
                //IncludeTotal = true,
            });
        });
}              

3. Create AutoQuery APIs

With AutoQuery configured, we can now start creating AutoQuery APIs, a minimal working example is an empty Request DTO which we'll make available via the /todos route:

// ServiceModel/Todos.cs
using ServiceStack;

namespace MyApp.ServiceModel;

[Route("/todos")]
public class QueryTodos : QueryDb<Todo> {}              

4. Query your API

That's all that's needed! From your contract-first API blueprint ServiceStack implements a fully queryable, type safe API for the Todo table that you can immediately viewing the API from the /todos route in a browser where you can immediately benefit from the Auto HTML API page:

Next Steps

Hopefully this simple example shows how easy it is to get up & running and become immediately productive with AutoQuery. For larger projects we recommend adopting the physical project structure and creating RDBMS tables with OrmLite's Code-First DB Migrations.

The easiest way of which is to start from a new project template with all this configured, like the razor.web-templates.io Razor Pages template:

Multiple, clean data formats allows for flexible integrations

As all AutoQuery Services are pure HTTP APIs available in multiple data formats they allow for simple, rich integrations like being able to use its CSV Format to create live table data sources in Excel or easily import any query into any data store supporting CSV imports:

AutoQuery's usage of simple, user-defined Clean URLs and intuitive implicit query conventions makes it easy for stakeholders to create custom Queries of their Systems Data that they can link to directly in their Excel worksheets to generate Live Reports: