A common task when calling web resources from a code is building a query string to including all the necessary parameters. While by all means no rocket science, there are some nifty details you need to take care of like, appending an &
if not the first parameter, encoding the parameters etc.
The code to do it is very simple, but a bit tedious:
StringBuilder SB = new StringBuilder();
if (NeedsToAddParameter A)
{
SB.Append("A="); SB.Append(HttpUtility.UrlEncode("TheValueOfA"));
}
if (NeedsToAddParameter B)
{
if (SB.Length>0) SB.Append("&");
SB.Append("B="); SB.Append(HttpUtility.UrlEncode("TheValueOfB")); }
}
This is such a common task one would expect a utility class to exist that makes it more elegant and readable. Scanning MSDN, I failed to find one—which brings me to the following question:
What is the most elegant clean way you know of doing the above?
If you look under the hood the QueryString property is a NameValueCollection. When I've done similar things I've usually been interested in serialising AND deserialising so my suggestion is to build a NameValueCollection up and then pass to:
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
private string ToQueryString(NameValueCollection nvc)
{
var array = (
from key in nvc.AllKeys
from value in nvc.GetValues(key)
select string.Format(
"{0}={1}",
HttpUtility.UrlEncode(key),
HttpUtility.UrlEncode(value))
).ToArray();
return "?" + string.Join("&", array);
}
I imagine there's a super elegant way to do this in LINQ too...