How to call a WebService which has a querystring data? - asp.net

Question

I have a webservice which i need to call in .net application. The link looks like this.
http://www.contoso.com/student?id=12345
This will work only when its called like this. For rest of the this i dont have access. ie if i call it on a browser without the querystring it will not work. but with querystring it will return an XML data.
Now, when i call this in the .net application its not working?
How can I call this in a .NET application?
The Normal Webservice Importing methods are not working since it needs a querystring with value and we dont have access to the links which doesnt have the querystring.

Answer 1

How are you currently trying to download it?
A very simple way to do this is to use the HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse classes;
public XmlDocument GetStudentXml(int studentId)
{
XmlDocument targetXml = new XmlDocument();
HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(String.Format("http://www.contoso.com/student?id={0}", studentId));
webRequest.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
webRequest.Accept = "text/xml";
HttpWebResponse webResponse = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();
using (Stream responseStream = webResponse.GetResponseStream())
{
XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(responseStream);
targetXml.Load(reader);
reader.Close();
}
webResponse.Close();
return targetXml;
}
This method simply creates a HttpWebRequest, initializes it with the URL (via String.Format so as to append the student id), some windows credentials and the expected content type.
It then calls the remote address via the GetResponse method. The response is then loaded into a stream, and an XmlTextReader is used to load the Xml data from the response stream into the XmlDocument, which is then returned to the caller.
You can also use WebClient and XDocument to achieve the same thing:
string url = String.Format("http://www.contoso.com/student?id={0}", studentId);
string remoteXml;
using (var webClient = new WebClient())
{
remoteXml = webClient.DownloadString(url);
}
XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse(remoteXml);