HttpWebRequest For Scribe Online Api

Scribe has made it extremely easy to work with their API.  Currently, in my limited free time, I am working on a reusable C# library to send and receive data from Scribe's API.  Once it is completed for Version 1, I will list it to GitHub, so anyone can consume it and provide feedback on improvements.  There will be a fully built out wiki with how to consume the library with references to the Scribe API documentation.  Also there will be both TDD (Test Driven Development) and BDD (Behavior Driven Development) projects.  This way you can see examples of how to consume the library as well as what I tested before release.  If you are not familiar with BDD, I recommend you check out my blog post in my Dynamics 365 blog, that gives a high level overview of it.

Anyways, back to what this post is about.  While working on the library, I came across one small issue around TLS 1.2 and making sure that the web request uses it.  Luckily, this is really easy to set in C#, when using .NET 4.5.  By default .NET 4.5 does not send TLS 1.2.  It is supported, just not the default.  So if TLS 1.2 is set for an endpoint, then we need to specify to use it.  This way we decrease the chance of an error occurring.  Here is a blog post I came across that helped me with my issue.

Because I am using C# .NET 4.5 I simply needed to add the following line of code:

 ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Tls12  

The line of code is added right before my HttpWebRequest.  Here is the fully working request method:

     public string SendRequest(string username, string password, string url, string method)  
     {  
       WebResponseFactory factory = new WebResponseFactory();  
       ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Tls12;  
       HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);  
       request.Method = method;  
       request.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes($"{username}:{password}")));  
       request.ContentType = ParameterContentTypeSettings.applicationjson;  
       request.ContentLength = 0;  
       HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();  
       return factory.ProcessResponse(response);  
     }  

In this code I do use a factory to determine what kind of response I need to return.  It could be just a string response or a JSON string response response.  I have tested this against both Sandbox and Production API's with Scribe Online and it does work.  The only other thing I want to note in the above code, is I am sending a content length of 0.  This is because I did receive some error messages where content length was required, even though I wasn't sending a body.  If you need to send a JSON content body, there is the method where I do that:

        public string SendRequest(string username, string password, string url, string method, string contentBody)  
     {  
       ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();  
       byte[] encodedData = encoding.GetBytes(contentBody);  
       WebResponseFactory factory = new WebResponseFactory();  
       HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);  
       request.Method = method;  
       request.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes($"{username}:{password}")));  
       request.ContentType = ParameterContentTypeSettings.applicationjson;  
       request.ContentLength = encodedData.Length;  
       var requestStream = request.GetRequestStream();  
       requestStream.Write(encodedData, 0, encodedData.Length);  
       requestStream.Close();  
       HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();  
       return factory.ProcessResponse(response);  
     }  

If you need any help on working with the Scribe Api, please feel free to leave a comment below or leave a post in the Scribe Forums.  Also check out Scribe's Developer Portal for additional information.

References:
Tarnovskiy, S. (2016, April 28). TLS 1.2 and .NET Support: How to Avoid Connection Errors. Retrieved April 30, 2018, from https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/04/tsl-1-2-and-net-support/