Question

Perhaps I should back up a bit to explain what I’m trying to do.

I’m trying to make an app that will notify me half hour before it is sunset. I like to work on my blueprints up in the mountains however I have a habit of losing track of time and getting stuck up there in the dark. IT would be a lot easier if I knew where I was going to be every day however due to travel I am constantly at different places between Sacramento and Dover. So I want to make an application that can programatically get the data from http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunrise.html. That website contains a dropdown list where a location is selected and then it takes you to a table that contains the sunset time for the day (and other information not relevant to me).

I ran the process through a program called Fiddler and found that it uses a get request on the value selected in the dropdown box. For example, when I select USA – California – Sacramento the web traffic (according to fiddler) is as follows:

GET http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=217 200 OK
(text/html)

So, I think I can pass the n=217 in a WebRequest

 WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=217");        
 request.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
 HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

But the problem is I need my program to select Sacramento or Dover etc in code. I Imagine something like

public string GetCityValue(string city)
{
    string cityvalue = null;

    if (city.Contains("Sacramento")) 
    {
        cityvalue = "217";
    }

    if (city.Contains("Dover"))
    {
        cityvalue = "217";
    }

    return cityvalue; 
}

Or perhaps there is a way to put all the dropdown list otions into a list and search the list for the string in the method parameter, anyway those details dont worry me for now. Mostly I just am confused on how I can select a city from the list and get the table on generated page with my own code.

Please let me know if I failed to give necessary information and such.

Thanks

Answer 1

This seems like a use case for a dictionary:

//setup dictionary
Dictionary<string, int> cityMapping = new Dictionary<string, int>()
{
    { "Sacramento", 217 },
    { "Dover", 218 }
};

//query dictionary:
int cityCode = cityMapping["Sacramento"];

You may want to put this mapping into an XML file so you can more easily update and change it. For example given this XML:

<CityMappings>
  <City name="Sacramento" code="217"/>
  <City name="Dover" code="218"/>
</CityMappings>

You could create your cityMapping dictionary like this:

var cityMapping = XElement.Load("test.xml")
                            .Descendants("City")
                            .ToDictionary(x => x.Attribute("name").Value, 
                                          x => int.Parse(x.Attribute("code").Value));