Unknown WebService description and consume it from C# - c#

I'm quite a noob and have been developing 'seriously' (as my job) from a couple of months barely, so i apologize in advance for my ignorance.
There is this web service that i need to consume from a C# client on an aspx page I want to develop, but first I need to understand the webservice, I'm not sure which language it's made upon but I think it's PERL, since the web service's URL is like this "http://wschsol.mideplan.cl/mod_perl/xml/fps-by-rut". This webservice was developed by other people which i cannot contact right now and is running on a linux server to which i don't have access either.
The webservice's job is pretty simple, it receives a person's national ID number and returns some information about him on xml format, which i want to show on my client aspx page with some grids and stuff.
I have read around the internet that it's possible to see a description of a webservice and its methods using the WSDL variable after the common ".asmx" extension, but in this case there is no extension and so, i can't use the the ?WSDL. I'm guessing that maybe "fps_by_rut" is only a webmethod, and not the webservice itself. So the question is: how do I use the webservice?
Since I know what kind of request is expected (a person's ID), I tried to manually add an ID to the URL through the browser (like this: "http://wschsol.mideplan.cl/mod_perl/xml/fps-by-rut?rut=6985462-1") and if I do it responds normally in xml format.
I tried to add a web service reference for it on my project, but well, i pasted the whole URL and when I click "go" it says it needs credentials. I have these credentials, a user and password, but they are not working... what confuses me is that there is another client to this same webservice programmed on classic asp made by the guy before me here, and i can acces that code, and when i see the line on which he calls the web service it's like this:
xml.Open "GET", "http://wschsol.mideplan.cl/mod_perl/xml/fps-by-rut?rut="&rsVac(0), False,"user","password"
i have censored the "user" and "password" strings since those are the actual credentials. This classic asp client works fine with those credentials. I tried to use those when creating the reference, but they are not working. Even more, when i manually added the ID through the browser it asked me for credentials and they worked too...
Am I going the wrong way? Please guys, i need guidance. If there is a course out there which I can read that helps me understand all of this webservices stuff, i'd be hugely grateful. Or if someone can tell me which way to go, I'm pretty sure I'm in the wrong direction...
Thanks in advance for any help!!!

WSDL is used for SOAP and we both don't know if it's an SOAP-Service.
You should just use a HttpClient and make your Get-Calls to the API.
You can use something like this:
var client = new HttpClient();
client.BaseAddress = new Uri("http://wschsol.mideplan.cl");
var httpResponse = await client.GetStringAsync("mod_perl/xml/fps-by-rut?rut=<InsertParamHere>");
Edit Authorization:
You have to add this:
var byteArray = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("username:password1234");
client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new System.Net.Http.Headers.AuthenticationHeaderValue("Basic", Convert.ToBase64String(byteArray));
Snippet source: Simple C# .NET 4.5 HTTPClient Request Using Basic Auth and Proxy

Related

Send login credentials from C# client to Yii SOAP server

So, I have SOAP handling classes from https://soapclient.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest. Using provided methods, I managed to connect to server and retrieve data, like:
SoapClient client = new SoapClient("http://somelink.someserver.net/~johndoe/gogogo/servis");
XElement myEle = client.Invoke("getProjekti");
What I need to do next is to provide HTTP authentication i.e. to send login credentials to web server. There is a way of adding Username and Password to a provided SoapHeader:
client.Header = new SoapHeader();
client.Header.Name = "AuthHeader";
client.Header.Add("UserName", "student");
client.Header.Add("PassWord", "student");
And there's the roadblock for me. What to do next? Common sense and programming experience make me think that there should be, hypothetically, request method that will now somehow send that header to web server, like:
bool sendLoginRequestToServer(client)
or something, returning true if login is successful or false otherwise. Despite vigorous search I was only left puzzled, since many people use many methods, most of which I failed to understand. What makes it even more difficult for me is that most of tutorials cover C# WebService, while I have ordinary WinForms GUI application. Solution within aforementioned SoapClient would be preferable, but I would settle for anything that works.

Handling Authentication for a File Display using a Web Service

This is my first time developing this kind of system, so many of these concepts are very new to me. Any and all help would be appreciated. I'll try to sum up what I'm doing as efficiently as possible.
Background: I have a web application running AngularJS with Bootstrap. The app communicates with the server and DB through a web service programmed using C#. On the site, users can upload files and reference them later using direct links. There's no restriction to file type (yet), so just about anything is allowed.
My Goal: Having direct links creates a big security problem for me, since the documents/images are supposed to be private data. What I would prefer to do is validate a user's credentials when the link is clicked, then load the file in the browser using a more generic url path.
--Example--
"mysite.com/attachments/1" ---> (Image)
--instead of--
"mysite.com/data/files/importantImg.jpg"
Where I'm At: Not very far. My first thought was to add a page that sends the server request and receives a file byte stream along with mime type that I can reassemble and present to the user. However, I have no idea if this is possible using a web service that sends JSON requests, nor do I have a clue about how the reassembling process would work client-side.
Like I said, I'll take any and all advice. I'd love to learn more about this subject for future projects as well, but for now I just need to be pointed in the right direction.
Your first thought is correct, for it, you need to use the Response object, and more specifically the AddHeader and Write functions. Of course this will be a different page that will only handle file downloads, so it will be perfectly fine in your JSON web service.
I don't think you want to do this with a web service. Just use a regular IHttpHandler to perform the validation and return the data. So you would have the URL "attachments/1" get rewritten to "attachments/download.ashx?id=1". When you've verified access, write the data to the response stream. You can use the Content Disposition header to set the file name.

HttpClient one response from different countries

I have a simple aplication in Windows Store.
This application download and parse HTML from website.
I using a HttpClient class
Now I have a big problem becouse a page looks diffrent form specific countries and my parsing is not success.
Example: When someone from USA using my app then app downloading diffrent HTML content becouse webpage looks diffrent in specific countries.
How to set a default location in http client?
I want to have a the same HTML in all executes.
EDIT
I calling this page: LINK
You need to set the default language header when you make the request and/or consider making it a user definable setting.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/SVR5
ignoring the initial question for a moment
PLEASE don't write an app that depends on any kind of HTML parsing for any functionality. All the site you are calling has to do is change an ID or two in the "wrong" place and your app will fail for every user until you put out an update.
back to the answer
OK, assuming that screen-scraping is the way you want to go with your app, and assuming, of course, that the site you are scraping from allows such behaviour in their terms of use (check - it wouldn't be fun for you to get sued if you didn't read them) then I'd suggest a slightly different approach.
Since you are not guaranteed to get the same page layout for any locale your users access your app from, why not set up a web service that does the parsing work for you, and interrogate that service from your app instead of going direct to the site?
Your app <--> Your web service <--> the site providing data
That way, you always know that the data you are getting back is consistently formatted as if for a specific locale (your web server), and then you only have to maintain one piece of code to parse it. That will be much simpler whenever there is a change to the underlying data structure (and believe me, there will be changes)
The answer to this depends on how the website implements default language selection. Both of the other answers are potentially correct depending on how the specific site works.
If you can share the site URL, we can tell you a suitable strategy to use.
Setting the design flaw consideration aside for a moment (you may have or have not good reason to do screen scraping), here's how to set the Accept-Language header:
var httpClient = new HttpClient();
var httpRequestMessage = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Get, new Uri("http://www.livescore.com"));
httpRequestMessage.Headers.Add("Accept-Language", "en");
var response = await httpClient.SendAsync(httpRequestMessage);
string content = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
Try to always call the url in question with the cultureInfo path param if it has one, for example say that you are targeting microsoft.com then you would have something like this:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx for english
http://www.microsoft.com/de-DE/default.aspx for german
and so on. If this is applicable to you, this would be an ideea.

HTML message or login pages intercepting web service requests

I am busy working on a mobile application that retrieves data from a web service.
Ofcourse everything is working perfectly, I get everything I need to and I can consume the services without much effort... on the emulator.
However, when I move over to testing this application on the device, instead of getting back the data that I am expecting I am getting a website returned. How am I supposed to handle this?
Currently I am using this to call my service: (using system.net - I dont know if this is what I should be using on windows phone 7 either)
WebClient proxy = new WebClient();
string strURI = "http://www.google.co.za";
proxy.OpenReadCompleted +=
new OpenReadCompletedEventHandler(proxy_openreadcompleted);
proxy.OpenReadAsync(new Uri(strURI));
Please note: I am not really calling google, it is just an example. So anyways I am expecting my JSON to be returned, instead I am getting a message from the service provider to change mobile options... I can put this into isolated storage and render it with a browser, however I do not know what the source of the message is so when you click on a button, the forms use relative URLs, so instead of it doing what it is intened to do I just see what it is trying to call.
Is there anyway to get the source of the response? I am looking for a source like http://vodafonelive.mobi/ or something like that. If someone can tell me what to do I would greatly appreciate it, my current thinking is that if I can identify the source I can create a webbrowser task so that my application does not need to handle this, however... since I am calling a specific source I don't know how to identify where the response is comming from.
Any help is appreciated.
This is most likely due to differences in the user agent of the emulator and the device. Check what is sent or set this explicitly to ensure that the 2 behave in the same way. To ensure the server doesn't try and redirect to a different location.
Alternatively, it could be a mobile operator proxy being "helpful" and adjusting the request that goes over their network.
Ok so after spending some time on this, I finally found a way that I could get a response uri (where the response was comming from) by using another method to do the call to the service:
So basically this is the call:
WebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create(strURI);
var result = (IAsyncResult)request.BeginGetResponse(ResponseCallback, request);
So in the function ResponseCallBack function I do something like this:
WebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)result.AsyncState;
WebResponse response = request.EndGetResponse(result);
which then allows me to check the response uri (the source of the intercepted message) and have the native browser handle the html that I was not expecting.
WebBrowserTask webBrowserTask = new WebBrowserTask();
webBrowserTask.Uri = response.ResponseUri;
Thanks for the help though, hopefully this will help someone with a similar issue.

Both WebClient and HttpWebRequest suddenly failing to pull basic Amazon pages?

We have an in-house application that pulls some data from some of Amazon's pages occassionally (We know they have APIs for certain operations... what we're doing requires some custom info not included in the APIs). We have never had a problem pulling their pages, but suddenly Amazon is returning "(503) Server Unavailable" on pretty much every request, and this has been happening for several days, so we doubt it's a temporary thing. Even something as simple as this:
System.Net.WebClient client = new System.Net.WebClient();
string data = client.DownloadString(new Uri("http://www.amazon.com/Bose-Companion-multimedia-speaker-Graphite/dp/B000HZBR64/"));
The strange thing is that these pages load just fine in a web browser, but any time we try to pull them through code, it is failing.
What could cause these functions to fail? Is it possible that they changed something on their end and that we need to do some custom logic with our calls?
After some further testing, it turns out that this was happening because Amazon needs the Accept parameter of the HttpWebRequest to be specifically set. When setting it to:
request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8"
Everything worked fine. This is a recent change, so they must have altered something on their end.
check the user-agent of you request. make the user-agent the same as your browser. And check if you set any proxy for your app? maybe your browser and your app are using different proxies

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