C# ASP.NET MVC - Dealing with an API that returns an XML

Question

Hi,

So currently my basic web application retrieves data from the openweathermap api, for 1 day weather. The API used here returns just a single Json object.

http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=London&units=metric

However when I want to modify my application in order to use the 5 day forecast, the api returns the data as XML:

http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?q=London,us&mode=xml

I'm not sure how to process this information.

Currently I have a class with a method that calls the API:

string url = "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=London&units=metric&APPID=";

var webclient = new WebClient();
var urlcontent = client.DownloadString(url);
var jsserializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
var newjsonContent = serializer.Deserialize<Object>(content);
return newjsonContent;

Any ideas please?

Thanks

Answer 1 · 2017-08-09T08:22:12Z

August 9, 2017 8:22am

If you'll notice, in the 2nd URL you posted, you specified that you want the return value to be in XML. The documentation of that API specifies that the mode variable you set has 2 possible values: xml and JSON. If you omit that variable altogether, the API will return JSON by default. Thus, you have 2 options: You can either remove &mode=xml from the end of your URL, or you can change xml to JSON in that URL. Both methods will ask the API to return JSON instead of XML

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Derek Vha

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C# ASP.NET MVC - Dealing with an API that returns an XML

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Michael Hulet

Michael Hulet