Is it an antipattern to call WEBAPI services from MVC Controllers?
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If it was decided to use WebAPI to create a service layer to be used for a variety of clients.  What would be the best way to architect the web client?  

As WebAPI is web-friendly it would be possible to consume this directly from the client using javascript.  However I would worry that this can get messy fairly quickly and javascript is not the easiest technology to unit test.

An alternative would be to use the HttpClient class to call the REST services from MVC controllers.  Is this a valid approach?

I suppose that the two approachs above could be combined but I would worry that this would get messy.  Would you agree that it would be better to go with one approach or the another?

Sorry I have seen many posts on whether to use WebAPI or MVC but none on combining the two.

Thoughts?