UriBuilder does not work well with QueryBuilder

[NTaylorMullen]

The UriBuilder class automatically prepends a ? to its Query property which is troublesome when trying to construct a new uri.

For instance:

[Tratcher]

What were you going to do with the result?

System.Uri is not well suited for use in HTTP headers. https://github.com/aspnet/HttpAbstractions/blob/dev/src/Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http.Extensions/UriHelper.cs works better there.

MVC has other APIs for building urls in HTML bodies.

[NTaylorMullen]

Was going to pass the resulting Uri to an HttpClient. Its post methods accept a Uri so the UriBuilder/QueryBuilder seemed well suited.

[Tratcher]

Ah. UriHelper should work in place of UriBuilder too.

[NTaylorMullen]

Hmm? How would you use UriHelper to do what UriBuilder does? From the class it looks that it's only good for encoding and reading info from a request.

[Tratcher]

            var query = new QueryBuilder()
            {
                { "hello", "world" }
            }.ToQueryString();

            var encoded = UriHelper.Encode("http", new HostString("contoso.com"), query: query);
            var uri = new Uri(encoded, UriKind.Absolute);

            Console.WriteLine(uri.AbsoluteUri);

[NTaylorMullen]

Is that really what we expect users to be doing? The APIs seem very awkward.

[Tratcher]

We never ask users to build a System.Uri, it's only used in client APIs.

[NTaylorMullen]

Talked offline and we both agree that QueryBuilder on its own is actually a really nice API; however, the end-to-end usage of it is horribad 😄. This is primarily due to the UriHelper API.

Therefore, closing this in favor of fixing #573. If you want to also add API to make this consumable from UriBuilder feel free to reopen this.