Consuming a REST XML web service

Question

I\'m trying to consume the following web service http://ipinfodb.com/ip_location_api.php this web service returns an xml response, the code below gets the XML response, but

Answer 1

I use the this same API, I load the response XML into an XDocument and parse e.g.

// build URL up at runtime
string apiKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["geoApiKey"];
string url = String.Format(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["geoApiUrl"], apiKey, ip);

WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
try
{
    WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
    using (var sr = new System.IO.StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
    {
        XDocument xmlDoc = new XDocument();
        try
        {
            xmlDoc = XDocument.Parse(sr.ReadToEnd());
            string status = xmlDoc.Root.Element("Status").Value;
            Console.WriteLine("Response status: {0}", status);
            if (status == "OK")
            { 
                // if the status is OK it's normally safe to assume the required elements
                // are there. However, if you want to be safe you can always check the element
                // exists before retrieving the value
                Console.WriteLine(xmlDoc.Root.Element("CountryCode").Value);
                Console.WriteLine(xmlDoc.Root.Element("CountryName").Value);
                ...
            }                
        }
        catch (Exception)
        {
            // handle if necessary
        }   
    }
}
catch (WebException)
{
    // handle if necessary    
}

What you should also do is introduce a custom class e.g. GeoLocationInfo and wrap your code in a function e.g. GetGeoLocation(string ip) then instead of writing the info to the console window you can populate & return an instance of that class.