Setting up the Analytics SDK Server with ASP.NET

Step 1 - Create a New ASP.NET Core Web API

The steps below describe how to create a new ASP.NET Core Web API project. If you want to add the Analytics SDK to an existing application, go to Step 2.

1 - Start Visual Studio 2019 and click Create a new project on the start page, select the ASP.NET Core Web API template, and click Next.

2 - Provide a project name and set the location to the server directory we created earlier, and click Next.

3 - Choose your framework, authentication type, and Docker options, and then click Create.

Step 2 - Add Analytics SDK

1 - Right click the Solution, or Project, and select Manage NuGet Packages for Solution.

2 - In the package manager dialog, open the Browse tab, select the Infragistics (Local) package source, and install the Analytics.Sdk.Web.AspNetCore NuGet package into the project.

Note

If you are a trial user, you can install the Analytics.Sdk.Web.AspNetCore.Trial NuGet package found on NuGet.org.

3 - Open and modify the Program.cs file to add the namespace using Analytics.Sdk;. Then, add the call to IMcvBuilder.AddAnalytics() to the existing builder.Services.AddControllers() method as follows:

using Analytics.Sdk;

builder.Services.AddControllers().AddAnalytics();

Step 3 - Create the Dashboards Folder

1 - Right-click the project and select Add -> New Folder. The folder MUST be named Dashboards .

By default, the Analytics SDK uses a convention that will load all dashboards from the Dashboards folder. You can change this convention by creating a custom IRVDashboardProvider. You can learn more about this in the Loading Dashboards topic.

Step 4 - Setup CORs Policy (Debugging)

While developing and debugging your application, it is common to host the server and client app on different URLs. For example; your Server my be running on https://localhost:24519, while your Angular app may be running on https://localhost:4200. If you were to try and load a dashboard from the client application, it would fail because of ASP.NET Core's Cross-Origin Requests (CORs) security policy. To enable this scenario, you must create a CORs policy and enable it in the server project.

1 - Open and modify the Program.cs file to create a CORs policy which will allow any origin (url) access to any headers and methods.

builder.Services.AddCors(options =>
{
  options.AddPolicy("AllowAll",
    builder => builder.AllowAnyOrigin().AllowAnyHeader().AllowAnyMethod()
  );
});

2 - Apply the policy only while in debug mode. If you have a production application then you would apply the appropriate policy for your production builds.

if (app.Environment.IsDevelopment())
{
    app.UseCors("AllowAll");
}

It's important to understand the order in which the middleware executes. The UseCors must be called in a specific order. In this example after UseHttpsRedirection() and before UseAuthorization(). For more information, please refer to this Microsoft help topic

Next Steps:

Note

The source code to this sample can be found on GitHub.