Question

On 01.08.12 Bing modified their search api to a Azure, How can I authenticate in Objective-C to use the new bing search api from Azure?

My best guess is to learn from the provided PHP example in the migration word document!! http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=248077 (Oh god, can’t you setup a web page!) or this Java Question – Bing Search API Azure Marketplace Authentication in Java

Answer 1

I’m using ASIHTTPRequest to authenticate with following code.

NSString *queryString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"'%@'", queryString];
queryString = [queryString urlEncodeUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; //You'll have to implement url encoding method, preferably in a string category file

NSString *urlString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Data.ashx/Bing/Search/v1/Image?Query=%@&Market='en-US'&$top=50&$format=json", queryString];

ASIHTTPRequest *request = [ASIHTTPRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:urlString] ];
[request setAuthenticationScheme:(NSString *)kCFHTTPAuthenticationSchemeBasic];
[request setUsername:@"YOUR_KEY_HERE"];
[request setPassword:@"YOUR_KEY_HERE"];
[request setDelegate:self];
[request startAsynchronous];

Please note, no appID required. just instead pass your key as username and password. It is successfully getting the data.

However, can’t really convert the data to NSString. tried every encoding but can’t get the string from the data. Initial googling says it’s UTF-8 encoded. But no success.

For above code to work, you must add ASIHTTP framework.

Another thing is, my guess is passing base64 encoded string with this format your_key:yourkey should also work with basic authentication.