How do I make calls to a REST API using C#?

Question

This is the code I have so far:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System;
using System.Net.Http;
usi         


        

Answer 1

Here are a few different ways of calling an external API in C# (updated 2019).

.NET's built-in ways:

• WebRequest& WebClient - verbose APIs & Microsoft's documentation is not very easy to follow
• HttpClient - .NET's newest kid on the block & much simpler to use than above.

Free, open-source NuGet Packages, which frankly have a much better developer experience than .NET's built in clients:

• ServiceStack.Text (1,000 GitHub stars, 7 million NuGet downloads) (*) - fast, light and resilient.
• RestSharp (6,000 GitHub stars, 23 million NuGet downloads) (*) - simple REST and HTTP API Client
• Flurl (1,700 GitHub stars, 3 million NuGet downloads) (*)- a fluent, portable, testable HTTP client library

All the above packages provide a great developer experience (i.e., concise, easy API) and are well maintained.

(*) as at August 2019

Example: Getting a Todo item from a Fake Rest API using ServiceStack.Text. The other libraries have very similar syntax.

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // Fake rest API
        string url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1";

        // GET data from API & map to POCO
        var todo =  url.GetJsonFromUrl().FromJson();

        // Print the result to screen
        todo.PrintDump();
    }

    public class Todo
    {
        public int UserId { get; set; }
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string Title { get; set; }
        public bool Completed { get; set; }
    }

}

Running the above example in a .NET Core Console app, produces the following output.

Install these packages using NuGet

Install-Package ServiceStack.Text, or

Install-Package RestSharp, or

Install-Package Flurl.Http