Connecting With .NET to WebTrends Web Services

Today I'm going to cover material around connecting to WebTrends new REST based Web Services.  To start off, let's cover the context behind the methods of making calls to these services.

There are two specific ways in which to connect to REST based Web Services, asynchronously and synchronously.  Depending on the type of application, tool, or other mechanism you are connecting to the services with you will want to use one or the other or might be using one or the other.

When making an asynchronous call against a service the application, or to be specific the calling thread, will initiate the call but continue executing without waiting for a response.  When the response is received an event fires and the data returned can then be handled in some way.  For client service applications, server based applications, or anything that needs to return control to the application or UI thread, this is the method to use.  This provides a smoother and more continuous application flow when an end user is accessing services.

A synchronous call against a service executes on the actual application thread itself, and holding that thread until a response returns.  This can make a UI appear to hang or freeze.  Often this is only used if there is no way to return data via a post event.  One scenario that would need to do this would be to render a page, or display, in its entirety before returning it to the user.  This is a common scenario on the web.  AJAX solves this to some degree, but often one still needs to render the entire initial page, and thus, must wait for the data to return.

Best Practice

The best practice is to use asynchronous calls.  Only use synchronous calls for stand alone processing or non-user viewed feeds.

A Simple Example

Here is a C# asynchronous call being made against our WebTrends Web Services.  Keep in mind, I'm providing these as examples, I do NOT suggest writing tests with Thread.Wait calls in them.

The example also shows how to setup your WebTrends Credentials for authenticating to our WebTrends Web Services.

    [TestClass]
    public class GetRestServices
    {
        private XDocument doc;

        private void svc_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
        {
            doc = XDocument.Parse(e.Result);
        }

        [TestMethod]
        public void TestAsynchronousCallWithSecurity()
        {
            const string baseUri = "https://ws.webtrends.com/beta/reportservice/profile/?format=xml";

            var svc = new WebClient();
            svc.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("yourWebTrendsAccount\WebTrendsUserName", "yourSuperSecretPassword");
            svc.DownloadStringCompleted += svc_DownloadStringCompleted;
            svc.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(baseUri));

            Thread.Sleep(3000);
            Assert.IsNotNull(doc);
            var docTest = new XDocument();
            Assert.IsInstanceOfType(doc, docTest.GetType());
        }
    }


Hope those are helpful.