Introduction
Often times developers work with third-party data. A very common way of accessing external vendor’s data is to make requests to their APIs (Application Programming Interface). Once we have access to their data, we can process in our application to suit our needs. Another common scenario is when an organisation has multiple independent applications that communicate amongst themselves. The so called microservices.
In this application we will learn how to connect to an external API through HTTP requests using .NET’s class library. It‘s easier than you imagine! Luckily there are many public APIs out there. Here’s a great list of public APIs for practice.
Requirements
- You were hired by restaurant to create a solution for their drinks menu.
- Their drinks menu is provided by an external company. All the data about the drinks is in the companies database, accessible through an API.
- Your job is to create a system that allows the restaurant employee to pull data from any drink in the database.
- You don't need SQL here, as you won't be operating the database. All you need is to create an user-friendly way to present the data to the users (the restaurant employees)
- When the users open the application, they should be presented with the Drinks Category Menu and invited to choose a category. Then they'll have the chance to choose a drink and see information about it.
- When the users visualise the drink detail, there shouldn't be any properties with empty values
Don't panic! We'll help! 😁
Resources
Here are the links for using HTTP calls with C# and to the Drinks API documentation:
Example Screenshots
Review Repository
https://github.com/TheCSharpAcademy/CodeReviews.Console.Drinks