How do I get my service written with WCF to return an iCal? The examples I see use either xml or json as the way to format the response. What is the best way to return other types of response bodies?
Something like this:
[WebGet(UriTemplate="{id}.ics")]
[OperationContract]
Stream GetCalendar(int id)
{
WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.ContentType="text/calendar";
//Now just return the appropriate data in iCal format in the Stream...
}
So now you can do an HTTP GET to e.g. yourService.svc/123.ics and get an iCal back.
The reason this works is that "Stream" is special-cased in WCF REST (used for non-XML, non-JSON responses).
Remember that you have to use both the WebHttpBinding and WebHttp behavior for this to work.
The simplest solution would be to return the iCal representation in XML or JSON format (your pick) as a simple string from your WCF call:
[ServiceContract]
interface IMyCalService
{
[OperationContract]
string GetiCal(.......);
}
and then go on and handle it further on the client, once you've received the string containing the iCal XML (or JSON). This can be done with standard WCF using SOAP.
Other ways to do it might be to use a WCF REST service which returns a response in iCal format when you hit a particular URL - this would require installing the WCF Rest Starter Kit for the time being (in .NET 3.0/3.5). I'm not intimately familiar with the iCal format, but I'm sure one way or another, you'll be able to construct the necessary XML format to satisfy the iCal requirements.
Marc
Related
I am developing a library for working with various types of cloud based queue services.
One of those services is the Azure Queue Storage REST API.
For the Amazon SQS service I can send an Accept: application/json header and the response is in JSON format.
Since JSON is a format that is supported by many APIs and XML is not fun to work with, I would prefer the Azure Storage REST API to also return a response in JSON format.
I have tried to set the Accept: application/json header to no avail. The responses are all in XML format with Content-Type: application/xml, which is obviously not what I was asking for.
Currently all code is in C with dependencies on a couple of libraries, including cURL and jansson, although for this question that doesn't really matter. It's just that I would like the library to be as simple and lightweight as possible.
I have a hard time digging through all kinds of documentation. Most topics I can find are about sending JSON within a message. But that's not what I'm going for.
Is it even possible to receive the actual responses in JSON? I would really like to drop my libxml2 dependency.
As pointed by #Tom Because the documentation is stating that it only return XML, I would personally write an azure function who becomes an adaptor which basically takes your request, sends it to azure queue storage, retrieves the xml response and then converts the xml response to json and return the json to the caller (which will be your C code).
A sample python code to convert xml to json is shown below:
import xmltodict
import json
text = ''
xpars = xmltodict.parse(text)
json = json.dumps(xpars)
print(json)
A sample xml message
text = '<QueueMessagesList>
<QueueMessage>
<MessageId>string-message-id</MessageId>
<InsertionTime>insertion-time</InsertionTime>
<ExpirationTime>expiration-time</ExpirationTime>
<PopReceipt>opaque-string-receipt-data</PopReceipt>
<TimeNextVisible>time-next-visible</TimeNextVisible>
<DequeueCount>integer</DequeueCount>
<MessageText>message-body</MessageText>
</QueueMessage>
</QueueMessagesList>'
And the response will be :
{
"QueueMessagesList": {
"QueueMessage": {
"MessageId": "string-message-id",
"InsertionTime": "insertion-time",
"ExpirationTime": "expiration-time",
"PopReceipt": "opaque-string-receipt-data",
"TimeNextVisible": "time-next-visible",
"DequeueCount": "integer",
"MessageText": "message-body"
}
}
}
Please Note: This whole thing can also be done using a Logic App in azure.
I have only shown the XML to JSON converter part here, but it is really straightforward to write an HTTP Trigger Azure Function to do the same. Or you can even write this converter into your C code as well.
Hope this helps you in moving on with your library development.
I have been creating Spring RESTful services for a while and typically I am building my own services so I create domain objects and populate them and the framework takes care of the conversion to JSON.
I have a situation now where I simply need my service to act as a pass through to another system's service that is already RESTful and returns JSON.
URL https://:/service/serviceInfo
Method GET
HTTP Content Type Produces: application/json
I simply want to wrap this call (I will apply some security checks on the service) and pass that JSON returned straight back to my service without mapping it back to Java objects, only to return as JSON to the client. Is there a simple way to do this, with minimal code?
Thanks in advance.
Can you see if this works for you?
#RequestMapping("/child")
public String testMethod(#RequestParam String param) {
return new RestTemplate().exchange("https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json", HttpMethod.GET, null, String.class).getBody();
}
You just replace the url for your own. I can also guide you to using the RestTemplate with POST or DELETE requests etc. if you need. Also adding parameters or headers if you need. I've used it extensively in some projects.
I have a WCF service that allows me make a request using an DTO and replies with a DTO for a WPF application. For example I pass a filter object for products which has a few properties for things I want to filter on and a couple of extras for paging, (the server will take care processing the filter object and getting the data) an example is like this.
public async Task<ObservableCollection<ProductListItem>> GetProductList(ProductFilter filter, int startIndex, int pageSize, string sortBy)
I am wondering if there exists any other technologies beside WCF that allow such an operation, From my preliminary research which may be quite off is that WebAPI uses the GET, POST, PUT verbs and routing rules which is quite different.
ServiceStack looks like it might be able to do this I can see on slide 37 at https://servicestack.net/features
it says.
List<Product> productOver2Bucks = client.Get(new FindProducts{PriceGreaterThan = 2})
Which seems pretty close but might still require Rest verbs as it uses a Get().
I don't know it it is FUD or not but I have been reading that soap over WCF is believed by some to be a legacy technology and JSON is the way of the future. So is there a replacement technology that will work with a method signature to the one I have above? That i could call from platforms such as Windows universal applications.
In ServiceStack if you design your Service with the Any method name, e.g
public object Any(Request request)
{
return new Response { ... };
}
This will allow calling this Service from Any HTTP Verb on any Format or endpoint (e.g. JSON, XML, MsgPack, Protocol Buffers, SOAP, Message Queue's, etc).
Also you don't need to define any [Route] for your Request DTO's since it will automatically fallback into using the pre-defined Routes when none are available.
public class Request : IReturn<Response> { ... }
public class Response { }
So with the above Service you can use ServiceStack .NET ServiceClients to call the API's using any verb, e.g:
var client = new JsonServiceClient(baseUrl);
Response response = client.Get(new Request { ... });
Response response = client.Post(new Request { ... });
When preferred you can also use the async API's, e.g:
var response = await client.GetAsync(new Request { ... });
var response = await client.PostAsync(new Request { ... });
Which if you don't care for using verbs you can use the generic Send API, e.g:
Response response = client.Send(new Request { ... });
Which just uses POST underneath, although it's highly recommended to use Get for "read only" queries as it will allow the Services HTTP responses to be cached by any intermediate HTTP Middleware or proxies.
Add ServiceStack Reference
Also if you're coming from WCF you'll also enjoy ServiceStack's, Add ServiceStack Reference which provides a number of advantages over WCF's Add Service Reference feature but still provides the same utility in being able to generate a typed API from a remote url for:
C# Add Reference
F# Add Reference
VB.NET Add Reference
TypeScript Add Reference
With more languages to follow.
Advantages over SOAP
Whilst ServiceStack still enables WSDL's, XSD's for your Services so they can be called from SOAP 1.1/1.2 endpoints for legacy compatible reasons - there are a number of reasons why using clean HTTP and JSON/XML API's are preferred.
I have a question regarding REST Assured. - https://code.google.com/p/rest-assured/wiki/Usage
I understand that I can use REST assured to make HTTP calls(.get .put etc.) and validate the response using when() etc. I would like to validate JSON responses that I have already saved in the database, instead of Calling the web service realtime and validating it's response.
Can I use REST-assured to Load a JSON response as a String and validate it?
Yes you can use Rest Assured's JsonPath project independently of Rest Assured (see getting started page). Once you have it in classpath you can do something like this:
JsonPath jsonPath = new JsonPath(<your json as string>);
String title = jsonPath.getString("x.y.title");
I'm want to try changing a SOAP WCF to accept requests and return results in JSON format to make the data traffic less bulky.
I see that JSON requests functions looks like this:
wcfClient.OpenReadAsync(http://yourUrl.com/wcf/service1.svc/GetEmployees)
and do the regular SOAP requests functions instead that looks like :
wcfClient.GetEmployeesAsync();
1) For JSON results, do you need to parse them into an object or is it automatically parsed like SOAP?
2) Is there a way to do this without doing too much work like changing every single WCF calls in the project to looks "JSON-ish"?
To complement Davut's answer - WCF does support building RESTful services, although I agree that the ASP.NET Web API framework in general easier to use than WCF. JSON.NET is a great library, and it has nice deserialization capabilities (e.g., it can easily take the JSON which represent the list of Employee objects and convert them into the actual List<Employee> instance)
But for completeness sake, if you want to use a "normal" WCF client to access WCF-based services which return JSON, you can do it. It's not too straightforward, but you can do that by using a new encoder and behavior which does the conversion. The post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carlosfigueira/archive/2010/04/29/consuming-rest-json-services-in-silverlight-4.aspx talks more about it, and has a pointer to a code sample.
In short, it's possible to consume JSON using a WCF client in Silverlight, but due to its complexity it's usually not done, and Davut's option (use a HTTP client such as WebClient to download JSON, then a library such as JSON.NET to parse it into objects) is preferred.
Firstly the idea "make the data traffic less bulky." is good.
Especially for Mobile devices. Beside this don't think that WCF xml causes network issues for PC. XM is the one of most compressible format. By WCF binary it goes as compressed.
For "Is there a way to do this without doing too much work?"
Yes there is a way name on it RESTFul Services(Restless Services). Now Microsoft directly support it by WEBApi.
Also you may use ODATA for filtering,ordering operations
Here are some links,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.web.webgetattribute.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rjacobs/archive/2010/06/14/how-to-do-api-key-verification-for-rest-services-in-net-4.aspx
ODATA
http://www.odata.org/documentation/uri-conventions#FilterSystemQueryOption
A few practice notes,Some restrictions:
EntityFrameWork entities derived from EntityObject which has IsReferenceType attribute doesn't allow you to JSON serialize. ( I produced POCO objects using an automapper mapped them and serialized json)
WEBAPI support you much think such as WebGet,WebInvoke GetXML Give JSON ,ODATA features(just select and format not allowed.)
Note:In your web request's header you should accept text/json to get really json.
"For JSON results, do you need to parse them into an object or..."
I can say you should try JSON.NET it's portable library works everywhere. When you deserialize with a generic function it returns you the collection you expect.
Hope it helps someone. While discovering these stackoverflow helped me like an assistant.