How do I call a web site API in my application

Question

I just decided to start learning about API's and how to append it to a label.

The thing is I've been looking over at GitHub and Codeproject but I couldn't find any examples or opensource projects that demonstrates what I want to learn.

I want to append the "id" from the API to a label.

https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/ethereum/
https://coinmarketcap.com/api/

But I have no idea how to initialize this.. Would I call I HttpWebRequest?

Answer 1

Use Newtonsoft.Json to deserialize your Json results into a C# object. Call the API Uri and get the content and use JsonConvert to deserialize to an object.

First, import Json library (Make sure you install from Package Manager)

using Newtonsoft.Json;

Then, use the following code to retrieve the id of the ticker.

const string uri = @"https://api.coinmarketcap.com/v1/ticker/ethereum/";
var client = new WebClient();
var content = client.DownloadString(uri);

var results = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<CoinApi>>(content);

label1.Text = results[0].Id; // ethereum

You need to specify the model class to deserialize.

public class CoinApi
{
    public string Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Symbol { get; set; }
    // ...
}