Question

My web application needs to be able to go and get all my projects from Paymo http://api.paymo.biz/

I am familiar with JSON and XML, but what I’m wondering is, how does one interact with the api (make calls to it).

I would ideally like to make a class in ASP .Net such as PaymoManager(int apikey….)

From there I can wrap the functionality I need. I just need to understand, how do I call functions of the API and how do I get the response. I am not familar with web apis.

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Edit: Could you give me an example of this, even with some abstract url. I need this done server side in a CS file.

Basically a simple example that calls someurl.com/somerequest and then how do you receive the JSON or XML… how does this work in terms of a class. I want this in a class.

Answer 1

http://api.paymo.biz/docs/misc.overview.html

To perform an action using the Paymo API, you need to send a request
to the Paymo webservice specifying a method and some arguments, and
will receive a formatted response.

This means that you can use WebClient to download a string from a url:

WebClient client = new WebClient();
string reply = client.DownloadString (address);

Depending on the format you specify, you can parse the reply as XML or JSON.

XDocument xml = XDocument.Parse(reply);

// where ReplyType is a class that defines public 
// properties matching the format of the json string
JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
ReplyType abc = serializer.Deserialize<ReplyType>(reply);