Question

I am working with Litle’s payment system, and I have to create an XML document, validate it against their XSD, and then transfer it over HTTP post.

Any suggestions?

Currently I’m planning on using the XmlDocument class for XML creation and validation, and still researching what to use to transfer this to the server, and get the response back (which is also in XML).

What would be the best method to use for this?

And no: there is no web-service based API. Just manually formatted XML and post’s. Although if there is some library out there that would automate this it would be hugely helpful.

Answer 1

You could use a WebClient to send HTTP requests.

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
    client.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.ContentType] = "text/xml";
    // you could add any other HTTP request headers that the server expects

    // fetch the XML that you want to POST
    string xml = ...
    byte[] data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(xml);
    // POST the XML to the given address
    byte[] result = client.UploadData("http://example.com", data);

    // TODO: process the result, for example load it in a XDocument
    using (var stream = new MemoryStream(result))
    using (var reader = XmlReader.Create(stream))
    {
        var doc = XDocument.Load(reader);
    }
}