Jun 12 2007

C# code to post to Livejournal

Posted by admin under .NET

While Xmlrpc in theory is a really nice feature, in practice it's really hard to work with. Never considered myself as a XML type of guy and now we're adding a whole new level of rpc urls, authentication etc.

I bet there might be some nice library out there, but when I need to get somethiung done I always take the easy way out - so here I poresent my quick and dirty code for posting a blog entry to your livejournal blog from C#:

I started out with how I wanted the C# code to look:



        protected void LiveJournalPost(string sHeader, string sTxt, string Username, string Password, string RpcUrl)
{
}

And here's that code:



...
            string sTxtPostData = @"<?xml version=""1.0""?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>LJ.XMLRPC.postevent</methodName>
<params>
<param>

<value><struct>
<member><name>username</name>
<value><string>" + Username + @"</string></value>
</member>
<member><name>password</name>

<value><string>" + Password + @"</string></value>
</member>
<member><name>event</name>
<value><string>" + sTxt + @"
</string></value>

</member>
<member><name>subject</name>
<value><string>" + sHeader + @"</string></value>
</member>
<member><name>lineendings</name>

<value><string>pc</string></value>
</member>
<member><name>year</name>
<value><int>" + DateTime.Now.Year.ToString() + @"</int></value>

</member>
<member><name>mon</name>
<value><int>" + DateTime.Now.Month.ToString() + @"</int></value>
</member>
<member><name>day</name>

<value><int>" + DateTime.Now.Day.ToString() + @"</int></value>
</member>
<member><name>hour</name>
<value><int>" + DateTime.Now.Hour.ToString() + @"</int></value>

</member>
<member><name>min</name>
<value><int>" + DateTime.Now.Minute.ToString() + @"</int></value>
</member>
</struct></value>

</param>
</params>
</methodCall>
";

            WebHelper.PostXml(RpcUrl, sTxtPostData);


...

Building up the XML the RPC endpoint at Livejournal wants to see by just creating a long string. 

And here's the WebHelper.PostXml code:




        public static string PostXml(string url, string sPostData)
        {
            string sRet = "ERROR";
            System.Net.WebClient oCli = null;
            try
            {
                oCli = new WebClient();
                oCli.Headers.Add("Content-Type", "text/xml");
                byte[] byteArray = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(sPostData);
                byte[] responseArray = oCli.UploadData(url, "POST", byteArray);
                sRet = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(responseArray);

            }
            catch (WebException ex)
            {
                //Console.Write(ex.Message);
            }
            if (oCli != null)
            {
                oCli.Dispose();
                oCli = null;
            }
            return sRet;

        }

So, calling it is like:

LiveJournalPost("The post header", "And some post content bla bla", "ljusername", "ljpassword", "http://www.livejournal.com/interface/xmlrpc");

 

 

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