ASP.NET MVC - Using cURL or similar to perform requests in application

Question

I\'m building an application in ASP.NET MVC (using C#) and I would like to know how I can perform calls like curl http://www.mywebsite.com/clients_list.xml inside my controller

Answer 1

This is the single line of code I use for calls to a RESTful API that returns JSON.

return ((dynamic) JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(
        new WebClient().DownloadString(
            GetUri(surveyId))
    )).data;

Notes

• The Uri is generated off stage using the surveyId and credentials
• The 'data' property is part of the de-serialized JSON object returned by the SurveyGizmo API

The Complete Service

public static class SurveyGizmoService
{
    public static string UserName { get { return WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SurveyGizmo.UserName"]; } }
    public static string Password { get { return WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SurveyGizmo.Password"]; } }
    public static string ApiUri { get { return WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SurveyGizmo.ApiUri"]; } }
    public static string SurveyId { get { return WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SurveyGizmo.Survey"]; } }

    public static dynamic GetSurvey(string surveyId = null)
    {
        return ((dynamic) JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(
                new WebClient().DownloadString(
                    GetUri(surveyId))
            )).data;
    }

    private static Uri GetUri(string surveyId = null)
    {
        if (surveyId == null) surveyId = SurveyId;
        return new UriBuilder(ApiUri)
                {
                        Path = "/head/survey/" + surveyId,
                        Query = String.Format("user:pass={0}:{1}", UserName, Password)
                }.Uri;
    }
}