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Support XML-based OpenAPI docs for minimal and controller-based APIs with Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi
#39927
Comments
Thanks for contacting us. We're moving this issue to the |
I feel this is a very important feature. Minimal Web API's are awesome but if we cannot use comments for use with Swagger, they lose their appeal. Please make this happen. |
Make minimal API's even better with comments 👍 must have feature. |
I consider this functionality unnecessary. Given the way REST APIs are created and the constant proliferation of approaches like microservices and API gateways, generating documentation in general makes no sense. The documentation generated falls short of the quality of the specification and reflects implementation errors. Generated documentation is unusable in practice for automation, mocking and testing. The specification first approach has been a trend for several years. |
The Open API documentation can be imported directly into Azure APIM (public facing). It makes a lot of sense. |
Just FYI, this already works, as long as you
That last point is the biggest sticking point - it would be great if you could use lambdas too, but at least this partially works 🙂 One observation (I'm not sure if it's a bug or expected behaviour). If you use |
Thanks for contacting us. We're moving this issue to the |
As far as feedback goes, 100% yes please implement this. We just started to move all our old Controller based APIs to new Minimal APIs and immediately realized none of the documentation was coming across in the swagger page. HUGE let-down! This is super important for public facing APIs, allowing developers to easily understand and consume REST services without the need for separate documentation. |
Five more comments and it will be moved to the .NET 9 Planning? :-D |
lol trust me i feel this way about some favorite issues of mine too To provide some more context here, at the moment, support for XML docs in OpenAPI isn't supported in-framework by ASP.NET. Instead, you're probably getting the functionality from whatever package you're using to render the Swagger UI and produce the OpenAPI JSON/YML document (usually NSwag or Swashbuckle for most people). This issue is tracking making integration of XML docs automatic for minimal APIs that leverage This feature has a lot of up-votes, which is one of the indicators we use for prioritization (see the docs on how we do milestone planning). So if these types of features will be helpful to you, giving the main issue an upvote is a great way to help identify which issues are important. Especially for OpenAPI, where TBH, there's a lot of L-XL sized issues that are one our bucket list. LMK if you have any other feedback/questions. BTW: I have made of prototype of built-in XML support so there has been some effort applied in this area already. |
@andrewlock, could you please point to an example where minimal api generates swagger including xml comments? |
@Lonli-Lokli It looks like the example that you provided showcases OpenAPI + Minimal API + API versioning. This blog post summarizes the XML-specific stuff. |
Hi all! I wanted to share some updates in this workstream as we get closer to .NET 9 RCs and beyond. Here's the TL;DR:
The extended edition for those who care about it: The long-term plan at the moment is to ship a source generator in-the-box with Doing the discovery work at compile-time allows us to take advantage of pre-existing APIs in Roslyn and in DocFX for discovering XML comments and mapping them to types which lends itself well to accuracy/completeness in the model since these APIs have had some battle-testing in the form of their integrations in Visual Studio QuickInfo and the .NET API docs on docs.microsoft.com. As for the delay in release, I want to take some time to polish the implementation instead of rushing to ship something in .NET 9 GA that will be incomplete/not land well. My plan at the moment is to ship a preview-level package of the XML support out of the AspLabs repo for .NET 9 and target this for official release as part of .NET 10. I think this strikes a good balance between giving those eager to try the feature the change to take advantage of it in .NET 9 and gives more bandwith to iterate and land on the right thing for an LTS release. So yeah....I wish I had better news to share 😅 but I hope this helps us make progress towards resolving this long-standing feature request once and for all. If you have any questions about the implementation details, let me know. I hope to get the preview code out once action on the main Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi work has slowed. |
What's great about ASP.NET is that many built-in framework components/services can be replaced with custom implementations, which is what third-party libraries are doing all the time. As a result, a rich ecosystem has emerged. The new OpenAPI integration in ASP.NET doesn't adhere to that design philosophy. Instead of being able to plug in alternate implementations, all that's provided are "fix-up-afterwards" extensibility points (the transformers). Solutions like this paint third-party and framework developers into a corner: instead of plugging in customized behavior, they need to implement additional components that first "undo" the built-in behaviors at runtime and then recreate or fix things up as needed. That's brittle and kills performance. And using a source generator, as proposed here, makes it impossible to customize the experience (because source generators can't depend on other source generators, and third-party renderers can no longer depend on runtime information). This isn't good enough. NSwag and Swashbuckle are widely used because they're very extensible and customizable. Instead of using a source generator, the tooling should scan the |
I think it depends on what you mean by alternate implementations here... The goal of the OpenAPI integration is to present information that ASP.NET Core understands about the binding/response serialization behavior of APIs in an application in a way that is compliant with the OpenAPI spec. In that sense, its purely a presentation layer and the things you want to extend/customize are the framework abstractions that end up influencing the binding/metadata rules (
What kind of customizations to the XML documentation implementation are you looking to make/influence?
Now, there's a separate discussion to be had about whether or not it makes sense to expose the information derived XML docs on types via the source generator in some other runtime API, but I'm not convinced that ASP.NET Core is the right place for an abstraction like that given it has no direct relationship to web APIs. |
I realize using The thing is that
What's the objection against ASP.NET storing XML doc-comments in the endpoint descriptions, instead of emitting source code? If the source generator is going to stay, is there a way for a library to deactivate it? |
I'm a bit confused. Is this support that is not shipping with .net 9 specifically for minimal api's? Or does the openapi generator in .net 9 (the Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi package) not support xml comments from controller methods either? Or does this post have nothing to do with |
Yes, this is a constraint for controller-based APIs as well.... .....BUT.... I've snapped out preview bits of XML support for both Minimal APIs + controller-based APIs out of the AspLabs repo. For now, this package is being shipping in preview out of the dotnet10 package feeds.
Currently, he functionality is on-by-default so once you add the package reference above you'll see annotations light up. No modifications to any code are necessary. Some limitations, caveats, and notes:
I've created a branch in the TrainingApi sample app to showcase the current state of the package. You can find that sample over https://github.com/captainsafia/TrainingApi/tree/safia/xml-support. I'll update the main description of the issue with these details and more now that we've got something going here. |
Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi
@martincostello (co-author of Swashbuckle) built an awesome library at https://github.com/martincostello/openapi-extensions that fills the gap for several missing key pieces in Please drop the non-extensible source generator effort proposed here in favor of how the To put this in perspective: I'm not concerned if rendering the |
This is incorrect. It doesn't read XML docs from ApiDescriptions, it reads and parses the XML file from disk directly (ref).
What extensibility is provided here? Can you show me the code that you would write to get the extensibility that you need?
Yes, that's because it uses transformer and ApiExplorer metadata, which is the same approach that a source generator-based implementation would be based on. With that in mind...
You've not clarified how a source generator makes the implementation non-extensible by default or what kind of extensibility you care about. In this comment, you stated that you want to be able to access XML docs in the
What aspects of a source generator-based approach make any of these things impossible?
This concern is completely separate from the discussion here. Code with poor performance characteristics is not exclusive to source generators and the assumption that just because something is implemented as a source generator it has inherently poor performance characteristics is invalid. In this comment, I shared the main value prop of using a Roslyn-based approach which is taking advantage of code reuse for existing XML doc handling in the the compiler. |
Agreed. I must have overlooked that part. That's a pity. It does however add action method descriptions to the metadata: This enables third-party code to modify these descriptions, which is what we need. It would be great if the same were done for doc-comments, but unfortunately, that's not currently the case. If similar attributes for models and their members were defined and ended up in the metadata (produced from
Yes, I've created a sample at https://github.com/bkoelman/OpenApiWithDocComments. The first commit is a standard Web API project, where I added From an extensibility perspective, this is still not as great as I hoped for, but at least it's heading in a usable direction. Because everything happens at runtime, third-party code can replace built-in services in the dependency container with custom implementations, which avoids executing the built-in logic. A third-party source generator can't prevent the built-in one from running and it must duplicate any built-in generation logic because it can't fallback to parts of the source generator. If more information ended up in metadata, it would be easier to intercept. And then we wouldn't need to create
I've provided examples of the extensibility we need at #39927 (comment). A source generator makes the implementation non-extensible because third-party code can't interact with it. It's an all-or-nothing experience. We could turn it off entirely, but then we'd also miss out on the generated code that translates metadata to OpenAPI. Similar to how we replace the built-in ASP.NET model validation today, we'd like to interact with (or replace, not undo afterward) the code that produces descriptions from triple-slash comments, but still rely on translating them from metadata to OpenAPI. This is why I'd like them to end up in the metadata. I'm starting to understand why a source generator is most convenient to implement. A roslyn visitor is used to build the documentation, which needs a
No, it is not. I'm not referring to code with poor performance characteristics, this is about how often it executes. The runtime provides source generators for JSON and regular expressions. While I haven't encountered projects containing thousands of regular expressions or JSON models, an API with thousands of endpoints and models isn't uncommon in enterprise-grade applications. Furthermore, the need for tweaking the logic that evaluates regular expressions is extremely rare, while JSON provides extensibility via converters (which enable to replace logic, not just supplement it). The performance hit from using source generators is not a theoretical concern. I've experienced firsthand that introducing a source generator in a large project degraded the development experience so much that it made me buy a new desktop computer. While source generators can be incremental, each project/solution build runs everything. So every time I build this project, I'm confronted with the slowdown. This happens all the time, while working on code that is unrelated to the source-generated bits. I've contributed a lot to https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn-analyzers in the past (and even got a LinkedIn recommendation from one of the C# team members), so I'm pretty familiar with writing such code that executes on almost every keystroke. Furthermore, we've had complaints from users that separate models from APIs in different projects, after we introduced a source generator that produces API-related code. It simply doesn't work. The source generator (which runs during build of the API project) scans for attributes on the models, but it won't see them in referenced projects. The only option in that case is to turn off the source generator entirely and revert back to handwritten code. I've tried the steps from #39927 (comment), but it doesn't work with .NET 9. It shows a compile error that the source generator didn't run because of a |
NSwag is really bad at preserving XML doc comment formatting. OpenAPI specifies support for markdown. Please consider the formatting of tags like |
The PR to add support for this was merged into main yesterday so it should land in .NET 10 Preview 2. Some general notes:
Nightly builds of the package are available (via these instructions) for anyone to try out. |
The extensions will be moved to a new package dependent on `Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi` in a follow-up PR. The changes in Swashbuckle are becoming harder to keep up with. The new package has support for numerous scenarios, AoT, and inhertdoc XML comments as seen in dotnet/aspnetcore#39927 (comment)
This issue tracks adding support for enhancing OpenAPI documents generated via the
Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi
package with XML comments present in both minimal and controller-based APIs and their shared types.Development for this is happening in preview over in the AspLabs repo in this directory but issues and discussions will happen here.
Eventually, the goal is to stabilize this source generator implementation then fold it into the
Microsoft.AspNetCoreOpenApi
. Tangentially, there's a soft goal to split out some of the logic for processing XML doc comments into structured metadata via Roslyn analysis into a separate package.Update from October 26th, 2024:
I've snapped out preview bits of XML support for both Minimal APIs + controller-based APIs out of the AspLabs repo. For now, this package is being shipping in preview out of the dotnet10 package feeds.
Currently, he functionality is on-by-default so once you add the package reference above you'll see annotations light up. No modifications to any code are necessary.
Some limitations, caveats, and notes:
Microsoft.AspNetCore.OpenApi
to generate your OpenAPI documents. Under the hood, it's using the transformer APIs in this package to apply the docs.crefs
as mentioned in the comment above but this is something I hope to tackle before we ship the package insideMicrosoft.AspnetCore.OpenApi
for v10.I've created a branch in the TrainingApi sample app to showcase the current state of the package. You can find that sample over https://github.com/captainsafia/TrainingApi/tree/safia/xml-support.
Open me for old issue content
Is there an existing issue for this?
Describe the bug
Swashbuckle currently supports reading the XML doc string associated with an action's method to derive the description, summary, example, etc for an action.
We need to add similar support for minimal endpoints where the documentation might be on a referenced method group or (maybe) on a
Map*
invocation.Expected Behavior
Should resolve the correct summary info.
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