Question

So this is my situation. I have to consume a third party web service (not wcf) from another WCF service that will serve as an intermediary between the first service and my web app. The problem is almost every example I have seen on doing this requieres you to Add Web/Service Reference to the app in order to generate the proxy, but I can’t add the reference, it returns an error, possibly due to some authentication required.

This service can be consumed only by either GET or POST. I was successful in consuming the service by both GET and POST from an ajax call with jquery in a web page, but I don’t know how to consume the service from inside a wcf service in c#.

An example GET request from the service is:

http://webservice.server.com/services/myservice?user=%5Busername%5D&password=%5Bpassword%5D&value1=%5Bsomevalue%5D&value2=%5Banothervalue%5D

The response is an xml with the status code of the operation and a status message, which I then proceed to save to a database.

How might I go about doing this?

Thank you for any help…

SOLUTION

Thanks to Sean for pointing me in the right direction. How I did it:

Reference article: How to use HttpWebRequest to send POST request to another web server

ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
string postData = "username=" + username;
postData += ("&password=" + password);
postData += ("&value1=" + val1);
postData += ("&value2=" + val2);
byte[] data = encoding.GetBytes(postData);

// Prepare POST web request...
HttpWebRequest myRequest =
  (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(new Uri("http://webservice.server.com/services/myservice"));
myRequest.Method = "POST";
myRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
myRequest.ContentLength = data.Length;
Stream newStream = myRequest.GetRequestStream();
// Send the data.
newStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
newStream.Close();

// Get response  
using (HttpWebResponse response = myRequest.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)
{
    // Get the response stream  
    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());

    // Read the whole contents and return as a string  
    result = reader.ReadToEnd();
}

XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse(result);

// Read XML

Please if you have any comments on my solution, objections or improvements, all comments are welcomed.

Answer 1

I think you’d want to take a look at the HttpRequest class:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.httprequest.aspx