Code Examples

See also this tutorial for more information about using the ASP.NET web API client libraries.

Making a GET request

Let's read orders created after a particular date. For security reasons, query results need to be paged, so we have to specify the $top option (and optionally $skip).

string publicKey = "0c6b33651708eb09c8a8d6036b79d739";
string secretKey = "3025c89ebaab20b71e0e42744239bf50";
string method = "get";
string accept = "application/json, text/javascript, */*"; 
string timestamp = DateTime.UtcNow.ToString("o");	// 2013-11-11T10:15:54.1731069Z
string url = "http://localhost:1260/odata/v1/Orders?$top=10&$filter=CreatedOnUtc gt datetime'2013-02-20T00:00:00'";

First, we create the message representation.

var uri = new Uri(url);		// decode url
if (uri.Query != null && uri.Query.Length > 0)
{
	url = string.Concat(uri.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Path), HttpUtility.UrlDecode(uri.Query));
}

var messageRepresentation = string.Join("\n",
   	method.ToLower(),
   	"",
   	accept.ToLower(),
   	url.ToLower(),
   	timestamp,
 	publicKey.ToLower()
);

It looks like:

get
application/json, text/javascript, */*
http://localhost:1260/odata/v1/orders?$top=10&$filter=createdonutc gt datetime'2013-02-20t00:00:00'
2013-11-11T10:15:54.1731069Z
0c6b33651708eb09c8a8d6036b79d739

Now, we can calculate the HMAC signature by using our secret key.

We have all the information to set up the request, so we create a web request object and pass the required headers.

The complete header looks like this:

Making a POST request

Posting means inserting data via API. This example shows how to add a new order note "Hello world!" to the order with ID 152. Here is the function to create the MD5 hash of the request body:

No other variables have changed.

We add the same header fields as in the previous example, and additionally:

Then, we write the content into the request stream.

The message representation is as follows:

The header looks like this:

As a general rule, POST, PUT and PATCH are returning the added or changed record. For example:

Processing the response

Example of reading the response into a string:

JSON data can be easily parsed into dynamic or strongly typed objects using Json.NET. This example deserializes a JSON string into a list of customers.

Dynamic JSON parsing might look like this: