If you are using ProxyApi and you have tried out the Web API Help Pages feature then you will have noticed a bunch of duplicate routes showing up for all of your actions that look something like this:

GET /api/{proxy}/Controller/Action?foo=bar

ProxyApi needs to be certain of the Route-to-Controller/Action mapping in order to correctly generate the JavaScript proxies, and it achieves this by inserting a custom route at the start of the route table so that it will always take precedence (if matched).

Unfortunately the Web API ApiExplorer finds these routes, maps them to the action and generates a duplicate route for every action in your API!

Getting Rid of the Routes

Thankfully it is very simple to filter these out.  When you add the Web API help pages package to your project it will generate a LOT of code that builds and renders the help page content.  This gives you plenty of entry points in which you can intercept and hide the ProxyApi-specific routes.

For our purposes here we can subclass the ApiExplorer class and filter out any route that contains “{proxy}”.

public class CustomApiExplorer : ApiExplorer
{
  public CustomApiExplorer(HttpConfiguration config) : base(config)
  {}

  public override bool ShouldExploreAction(string actionVariableValue, HttpActionDescriptor actionDescriptor, IHttpRoute route)
  {
    if (route.RouteTemplate.ToLower().Contains("{proxy}"))
      return false;

    return base.ShouldExploreAction(actionVariableValue, actionDescriptor, route);
  }
}

Now we just need to plug this implementation in instead of the default…

//in your help page configuration
config.Services.Replace(typeof(IApiExplorer), new CustomApiExplorer(config));

…and we’re done!