I have zero experience with Web API and JSON. My requirements are to create a service (I'm using Web API for this) that will accept MIME Encoded JSON data. The service will take that data, insert it into a database, and return the primary key value back to the client.
My hang-up is being able to know where to even start with this. A couple of questions that I have are:
When the device sends the JSON data, how will the service "accept" it? Meaning, what's being passed to the service isn't an URL that we commonly see with MVC (/Controller/Action/ID) which then invokes the Action Method. So, how will the service know what to invoke if I'm passing raw JSON data?
How would I test this if I don't have a device that sends the JSON data yet? Would I manually invoke an AJAX call and call that particular action method and pass in the JSON data that way?
I apologize for the seemingly elementary questions.
Thanks.
When you call a WebAPI-method you still have to specify the endpoint:
Example:
PUT /api/people
MVC knows from that that it should call the put-method on the PeopleController.
You can send raw JSON-data to test it. A good tool for that is HttpFiddler: http://fiddler2.com/
As for where to start, try to create a basic WebAPI-project with visual studio, it will include some samples and you can get going from that. If you run into wall, you can come back here
Related
I have a legacy system which is running VB6 which I use to gather sensitive customer data. This data then needs to be passed to an internal web site. I don't want to pass the data as GET variables on the URL. I'd prefer to POST them. I've spend many hours googling this issue, but I'm yet to find a solution.
How do I open a browser at a specific URL with POSTed variables from a VB6 application?
To confirm for all the people who are going to read this, the web page must open in a browser. I don't want to parse the response from the web page in the VB6
If you're using the IE browser control, just place the parameters in the Postdata parameter of the Navigate method. When the Navigate method is called, if the Postdata argument is empty, a GET is performed. When the Postdata argument has data, a POST is performed.
I'm working with a company on lead delivery, and they sent me some info regarding a Ping Post form setup. I've built hundreds of HTML forms processed by PHP (ie. sending an email/etc), but never something that would Ping a url, then return a value. The value it returns is XML.
Here's the purpose of the process:
I send a lead (form data) using the form with a particular zip code
This company parses that info, decides if it wants to "buy" it
Returns XML saying "Approved" or "Denied"
If "approved", I then post the data, and if "denied", I can do whatever I want
What is a common PHP method for doing this? I can research the code and put something together, just need to know what structure or PHP methods would work?
Thanks in advance.
You should be looking into RESTful Web Services.
here's a few examples that might help you
http://markroland.com/blog/restful-php-api/
http://coreymaynard.com/blog/creating-a-restful-api-with-php/
I did not create these examples, just what I found on Google.
I used file_get_contents(url) to handle the posting. The url contains inputs from the HTML form added as a query string, and the response is in XML which gets handled with simplexml_load_file().
As far as I understand your question what you need is to make an HTTP POST request and parse the incoming XML data.
I would rather not use file_get_contents() on remote servers - there are some potential security issues and it was missing some features the last time I checked. I strongly recommend cURL for remote HTTP/HTTPS communication.
Depending on the API you are posting to you might be able to use the SOAPclient class, but from the look of the response you got all you need is XML parser or Simple XML.
Anyway if you just need to check if a certain keyword (like Approved or Denied) is present you can use a simple string matching like this
if(strpos($response,'<STATUS>APPROVED</STATUS')!==false){
//approved
}
...
I'm trying to understand how webhook works. My understanding is that its the ability to connect two different applications. If I submit a webhook with url
localhost:3000/receiver
to one application, and I have my application with a method
def receiver
end
I was wondering if I don't know what the callback is from the webhook would be, how would I capture data? How do I save any JSON data thats communicating with my application? I was thinking maybe save some file to see what the objects are, but I'm still fairly new and not sure how to capture JSON data?
Thanks
If you are sure that the webhook is returning a JSON, you can so something like this
data_json = JSON.parse request.body.read
Sure, a webhook a is tool to sincronize two apps
You HAVE tou know the structure of the incoming json, because you need to get the info inside
By definition a webhook is sent by POST method, so you can capture it just inspecting the body of the petition, i.e.
webHook = JSON.parse(params[:something])
Your would try with github web hooks and publish your app in heroku, the api is very well documented and there are many examples.
My issue is that I do not know how to process an incoming request without knowing the URL that the post message is coming from.
The Vend API that I am trying to integrate with sends a post message to my URL with the following information:
"The POST body will include a field named payload. This field contains
a JSON encoded object with details of the object that caused the
hooked event. Other form fields (such as environment or domain_prefix)
may be present, but are not guaranteed to be.
The payload objects you’ll find in webhook requests are now the same
as those you’ll receive from the newer parts of the API marked as
version 1.0 or higher. So, for example, the product webhook should
give you a product payload that’s the same as if you requested
/api/1.0/product/{product_id}."
http://docs.vendhq.com/webhooks.html (here is the link for more details)
I'm fairly new to ASP MVC and I'm having trouble figuring out the best way to go forth. I need to eventually map the incoming name value pairs to my model.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
When you said you don't know the URL that the post message is coming from, I think you mean that you don't know the format of the URL (path and parameters) that the webhook is being posted to. The only things your MVC app needs to know in order to process the request are the names of the post parameters, which in this case is a single parameter named payload that contains a JSON string according to the snippet you included from the documentation.
There are several ways for you to get this data. One of the most simple is to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC's automatic mapping of POST parameters to controller action method parameters:
public ActionResult MyActionMethod(string payload)
{
// 'payload' will be automatically populated with the json string from the POST payload
}
Of course you now have to parse the json payload which you can do in several ways using the .NET framework or with any number of 3rd party libraries.
Trying to figure out a way where I can pass some data/fields from a web page back into my application. This needs to works on Windows/Linux/Mac so I can't use a DLL or ActiveX. Any ideas?
Here's the flow:
1. Application gathers some data and then sends it to a web page using POST that is either imbedded in the app or pops up a new IE window.
2. The web page does some services and then needs to relay the results back to the application.
The only way to do this that I can think of is writing the results locally from the page in a cookie or something like that and have the application monitor for a specific file in that folder.
Alternatively, make a web service that the application hits after passing control to the page and when the page is done the web service will return the data. This sounds like it might have some performance drawbacks.
Can anyone suggest any better solutions for this?
Thanks
My suggestion:
Break the processing logic out of the Web Page into a seperate assembly. You can then create a Web Service that handles all of the processing without needing to pass control over to a page.
Your application can then call the Web Service directly and then serialize the results and work with the data quite easily.
Update
Since the page is supplied by a third party, you obviously can't break anything out. The next best thing would be to handle the entire web request internal to your application (rather than popping a new Window).
With this method, you can get the raw HTTP response (and page markup) and work with it directly. You can then parse the Response stream and gather the required data from it.
During performing an HTTP request you should be able to retrieve the text returned by the page. For instance, if your HTTP POST was to hit a Java servlet, the doPost() method would be fired and you would then perform your actions, you could then use the PrintWriter object from the Response object (PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();) and write text back to the calling application. I'm not sure this helps?
The fact that
web page is hosted by a third party
and they need to be doing the
processing on their servers.
is important to this question.
I like your idea of having the app call a webservice after it passes the data to the third-paty web page. You can always call the webservice asynchronously if you're worried about blocking your application while waiting for results from this webservice.
Another option is that your application implements an XML-RPC server that can be called from the web page using PHP, Python or whatever you use to build the website
A REST server will do the job also...