Help!! Calling a different web site from a web service

Question

I need to call a different website that returns a value sting to me from a web service. I have a web service written that will call another API with a web interface. In VB 6 I used the Microsoft Internet Transfer Control and then fired the openURL method. How do I go about this in c#? Thanks

alfranzini · Answer

I had the same problem maybe this could help // Initialize the WebRequest. WebRequest myRequest = WebRequest.Create(http://www.nba.com); // Return the response. WebResponse myResponse = myRequest.GetResponse(); // Code to use the WebResponse goes here. // Obtain a 'Stream' object associated with the response object. Stream ReceiveStream = myResponse.GetResponseStream(); Encoding encode = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(utf-8); // Pipe the stream to a higher level stream reader with the required encoding format. StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader( ReceiveStream encode ); richTextBox1.Text = 
Response stream received
; Char[] read = new Char[256]; // Read 256 charcters at a time. int count = readStream.Read( read 0 256 ); richTextBox1.Text = HTML...
; while (count > 0) { // Dump the 256 characters on a string and display the string onto the console. String str = new String(read 0 count); richTextBox1.Text += str; count = readStream.Read(read 0 256); } // Release the resources of stream object. readStream.Close(); // Release the resources of response object. myResponse.Close();

spgilmore · Answer

There's an interesting discussion on a WebClient class in the C# Language forum here in a thread whose subject is file download posted by rdubey. Maybe this is better for what you're trying to to...

perry.turner · Answer

The data that is returned is just a stright chuck of text.

spgilmore · Answer

It would help to know what sort of data is returned by the other http service. If it's just a straight chunk of text or HTML you could use sockets and parse the output. A socket client is (effectively) a TELNET client an it can call the HTTP server and ask for the file you're trying to get. You can find the HTTP 1.0 standard in RFC 1945 and the HTTP/1.1 spec in RFC 2068. These are splattered all over the web and are easy to find. It's pretty easy though. Depending on the URL (say it's http://www.mydomain.com/directory1/document1) you can probably just connect to www.mydomain.com on port 80 with the client socket send the text GET directory1/document1 and the HTML response will be manifest unto you. Don't take my word for it though as I'm pretty new to .NET. There may be a better way such as an httpclient object somewhere or maybe a third-party assembly. If it's an XML web service you can very well have a SOAP client built into your webservice.