Consuming an ASP.NET Web API call in an MVC controller
Testing?

Then create a simple unit test and test your API controller or your business layer classes directly.
If you want to create an integration test or need a cleaner solution in production code read further.

Wrapping the API calls

This is just a disposable wrapper around the WebClient which can be easily reused.

public abstract class WebClientWrapperBase : IDisposable
{
    private readonly string _baseUrl;
    private Lazy&lt;WebClient&gt; _lazyClient;

    protected WebClientWrapperBase(string baseUrl)
    {
        _baseUrl = baseUrl.Trim('/');
        _lazyClient = new Lazy&lt;WebClient&gt;(() =&gt; new WebClient());
    }

    protected WebClient Client()
    {
        if (_lazyClient == null)
        {
            throw new ObjectDisposedException("WebClient has been disposed");
        }

        return _lazyClient.Value;
    }

    protected T Execute&lt;T&gt;(string urlSegment)
    {
        return JsonConvert.DeserializeObject&lt;T&gt;(Client().DownloadString(_baseUrl + '/' + urlSegment.TrimStart('/')));
    }

    ~WebClientWrapperBase()
    {
        Dispose(false);
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        Dispose(false);
        GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
    }

    protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
    {
        if (_lazyClient != null)
        {
            if (disposing)
            {
                if (_lazyClient.IsValueCreated)
                {
                    _lazyClient.Value.Dispose();
                    _lazyClient = null;
                }
            }

            // There are no unmanaged resources to release, but
            // if we add them, they need to be released here.
        }
    }
}


Creating a "strongly typed proxy":

class StudentDashboardClient : WebClientWrapperBase
{
    public StudentDashboardClient()
        : base("http://localhost/webapi/api/StudentDashboard/")
    {
        //just for compatibility
    }

    public StudentDashboardClient(string baseUrl)
        : base(baseUrl)
    {
    }

    public User GetUserRecord(string userName)
    {
        return Execute&lt;User&gt;("GetUserRecord?userName=" + userName);
    }
}


And then passing to your controllers where it's needed:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    private readonly StudentDashboardClient _studentDashboardClient;

    public HomeController(StudentDashboardClient studentDashboardClient)
    {
        _studentDashboardClient = studentDashboardClient;
    }

    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        return View(_studentDashboardClient.GetUserRecord("jBob"));
    }

    protected override void Dispose(bool disposing)
    {
        if (disposing)
        {
            _studentDashboardClient.Dispose();
        }
        base.Dispose(disposing);
    }
}


Note that the controller now have a parameterless constructor so you will need a solution to instantiate controllers this way for example a DI framework with MVC support like Ninject.

What you gain? Cleaner code.