Question

I am looking at adding SMS abilities to my WCF service. I found a cheap SMS service called Penny SMS.

Their interface supports json. But I have no idea how to call it in my WCF service.

Here is the interface/example:

Sample JSON-RPC Request

{ "method": "send",
  "params": [
            "YOUR_API_KEY",
            "[e-mail]",
            "5551231234",
            "Test Message from PENNY SMS"
            ]
}

How would I call that with C# from a WCF service? What I am looking for is a way to wrap this into a method call. Something like:

StaticSMSClass.SendSMS("1234567890", "My Message to send");

Note they also support an XML-RPC API if that is more doable from C#.

UPDATE: I made a stab at creating a call myself, but it did not work. I am going to post my attempt in a separate question and see if anyone has a way to do it.

Answer 1

You need to send a HTTP POST with the JSON message to the remote server. You can do this with HttpWebRequest. You either build the JSON manually (the messages seem simple), or define types for it and use a JSON serializer.

MSDN has an example, for your case it would look something like (untested):

string json = // Your JSON message
WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create ("http://api.pennysms.com/jsonrpc");
request.Method = "POST";
var postData = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(json);
request.ContentLength = postData.Length;
request.ContentType = "text/json";
using(var reqStream = request.GetRequestStream()) 
{
    reqStream.Write(postData);
}
using(var response = request.GetResponse())
{
    // Response status is in response.StatusCode
    // Or you can read the response content using response.GetResponseStream();
}