I introduced ASP.NET Web
API in some of my previous posts. Although Web
API is easy to use in ASP.NET web applications you can use Web
API also from other platforms. This post shows you how to consume ASP.NET Web
API from PHP scripts. Here are my previous posts about Web API: How content negotiation works? ASP.NET Web API: Extending content negotiation with new formats Query string based content formatting Although these posts cover content negotiation they give you some idea about how Web
API works. Test application On Web
API side I use the same sample application as in previous Web
API posts – very primitive web application to manage contacts. Listing contacts On the other machine I will run the following PHP script that works against my Web
API application: <?php // request list of contacts from Web
API $json = file_get_contents('http://vs2010dev:3613/api/contacts/'); // deserialize data from JSON $contacts = json_decode($json); ?> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> </head> <body> <table> <?php foreach($contacts as $contact) { ?> <tr> <td valign="top"> <?php echo $contact->FirstName ?> </td> <td valign="top"> <?php echo $contact->LastName ?> </td> <td valign="middle"> <form method="POST"> <input type="hidden" name="id" value="<?php echo $contact-/>Id ?>" /> <input type="submit" name="cmd" value="Delete"/> </form> </td> </tr> <?php } ?> </table> </body> </html> Notice how easy it is to handle JSON data in PHP! My PHP script produces the following output: Looks like data is here as it should be. Deleting contacts Now let’s write
code to delete contacts. Add this block of
code before any other
code in PHP script. if(@$_POST['cmd'] == 'Delete') { $errno = 0; $errstr = ''; $id = @$_POST['id']; $params = array('http' => array( 'method' => 'DELETE', 'content' => "" )); $url = 'http://vs2010dev:3613/api/contacts/'.$id; $ctx = stream_context_create($params); $fp = fopen($url, 'rb', false, $ctx); if (!$fp) { $res = false; } else { $res = stream_get_contents($fp); } fclose($fp); header('Location: /json.php'); exit; } Again simple
code. If we write also insert and update methods we may want to bundle those operations to single class. Conclusion ASP.NET Web
API is not only ASP.NET fun. It is available also for all other platforms. In this posting we wrote simple PHP client that is able to communicate with our Web
API application. We wrote only some simple
code, nothing complex. Same way we can use also platforms like Java, PERL and Ruby.
