title: Consuming WebApi from Mvc Controllers - HttpClient or reference API assembly?
body: <p>I have a solution with an MVC application and a Web API. They're in separate projects and domains (using CORS). I built it as a Web API to have the flexibility for adding consumers but currently my MVC application is the only consumer. As such I'm debating whether to use HttpClient inside my MVC Controller or directly instantiate the ApiController.</p>
  
  <p>In either case, I'm using dependency injection (Autofac) so I'd also like to know how to configure that because neither HttpClient or ApiController have any kind of interface that I can inject through constructor parameters like I usually do so I'm not sure how to handle this.</p>
  
  <p>What should the lifetime scopes be for the injected instance? HttpClient should probably be Singleton since it's not encouraged to dispose it after each request.</p>
  
  <p><strong>NOTE</strong> By calls to the API return large datasets used to populate charts which is why I'm leaning a bit away from HttpClient as I feel I will incur additional overhead using Http. Is it an antipattern to directly instantiate the ApiController?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>