Let's look a bit deeper into the Hello World service you created:

As you have seen, the convention for response DTO is RequestDTO and RequestDTOResponse. Note, request and response DTO should be in the same namespace if you want ServiceStack to recognize the DTO pair.

To support automatic exception handling, you also need to add a ResponseStatus property to the response DTO:

//Request DTO
public class Hello
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

//Response DTO
//Follows naming convention
public class HelloResponse
{
    public ResponseStatus ResponseStatus { get; set; } //Automatic exception handling
    
    public string Result { get; set; }
}

A service class is marked as such by its inheritance of the empty IService interface. You will generally want to do so by having such a class inherit from the more convenient Service base class which provides easy access to the most common functionality.

public class HelloService : Service
{
    public object Any(Hello request)
    {
        return new HelloResponse { Result = "Hello, " + request.Name };
    }
}

The above service can be called with Any HTTP Verb (e.g. GET, POST,..) and from any endpoint or format (e.g. JSON, XML, etc). You can also choose to handle a specific Verb by changing the method name to suit, e.g. here's how to change it so you only handle HTTP GET requests:

public class HelloService : Service
{
    public object Get(Hello  request)
    {
        return new HelloResponse { Result = "Hello, " + request.Name };
    }
}

To register your custom REST URLs, you can use the Route attribute on the request DTO:

//Request DTO
[Route("/hello")]
[Route("/hello/{Name}")]
public class Hello
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

The above service can now be called with:

var client = new JsonServiceClient(BaseUri);
HelloResponse response = client.Get<HelloResponse>("/hello/World!"); 

You can also make it even easier for your C# clients if you also provide the expected return type. E.g. if you add the IReturn<T> interface marker to your Request DTO like:

public class Hello : IReturn<HelloResponse>
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

Your clients will now also be able to make the same call above but with a fully-typed C# API, i.e:

HelloResponse response = client.Get(new Hello { Name = "World!" });

We highly recommend annotating your Request DTO's with the above IReturn<T> marker as it enables a generic typed API without clients having to know and specify the Response at each call-site, which would be invalidated and need to be manually updated if the Service Response Type changes.

More details on the Service Clients is available on the C#/.NET Service Clients page.

[Route("/hello/{Name}")]

only matches:

/hello/name

whereas:

[Route("/hello/{Name*}")]

matches:

/hello
/hello/name
/hello/my/name/is/ServiceStack 

More details about Routing is available on the Routing page.

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