Yesterday night I build an example on how to use Yahoo! Web Services with the AjaxPro JSON parser. The example will call a Yahoo! Web Service with output type set to JSON (see http://developer.yahoo.com/common/json.html). The response will be deserialized to an .NET structure using the AjaxPro JSON parser (from the stand-alone version or the build-in parser in Ajax.NET Professional).

First of all I have to get the response from the Web Service using the WebRequest class:

string query = "Madonna";    // demo search for "Madonna"
int count = 5;

WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(
   "http://api.search.yahoo.com/ImageSearchService/V1/imageSearch?appid=YahooDemo&query=" +
   query + "&results=" + count + "&output=json"
);

request.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(dataStream);

string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd();

reader.Close();
dataStream.Close();
response.Close();

Now, I have to deserialize the JSON response string to an .NET data type. I can simply generate an IJavaScriptObject from the JSON string and go to all properties. But today I'd like to get a real .NET class. I had a look on the result XML schema and build my own structures that will represent the results from the Yahoo! Web Service:

struct YahooResponse
{
  public YahooResultSet ResultSet;
}

struct YahooResultSet
{
  public int totalResultsAvailable;
  public int totalResultsReturned;
  public int firstResultPosition;
  public YahooResult[] Result;
}

struct YahooResult
{
  public string Title;
  public string Summary;
  public string Url;
  public string ClickUrl;
  public string RefererUrl;
  public string FileSize;
  public string FileFormat;
  public int Height;
  public int Width;
  public YahooThumbnail Thumbnail;
}

struct YahooThumbnail
{
  public string Url;
  public int Height;
  public int Width;
}

The next line will create a YahooResponse object from the JSON string...

YahooResponse r = JavaScriptDeserializer.DeserializeFromJson<YahooResponse>(responseFromServer);

...and allowes me to go through the result set with .NET data types. What do you think?

Console.WriteLine(r.ResultSet.totalResultsAvailable + " Results");

foreach (YahooResult s in r.ResultSet.Result)
{
  Console.WriteLine("\t ** " + s.Title);
  Console.WriteLine("\t    format: " + s.FileFormat);
  Console.WriteLine("\t      size: " + s.Width + " x " + s.Height);
}

Note: Did you noticed the generic DeserializeFromJson method which is new to the current release?

Update: Download example project from the Google group thread.

1 Comment

• Christopher Atkins said Friday, July 14, 2006 5:42:18 AM

  Very, very cool stuff, keep up the excellent work Michael!