Consuming REST APIs in Dynamics AX 2012

23 Jun 2014

Restful APIs are some of the most heavily used APIs in industry. They have become a good alternative for SOAP, COBRA and RPC. In this post we’ll look at the steps for consuming REST based APIs in Dynamics AX.

Dynamics AX provides great support for interacting with REST based APIs. We have a simple routine with which we can call different REST based APIs.Dynamics AX uses the System.Net namespace to call external APIs. The classes that are used to call the services are HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse.

Let’s look at a sample in which we’ll call a REST API with the HTTP GET Method

Declaration:

The following are the classes that will be used to get the data

System.Net.HttpWebRequestwebReq;

System.Net.HttpWebResponsewebRes;

CLRObjectclrObj;

System.IO.Stream stream;

System.IO.StreamReaderstreamRead;

System.IO.StreamWriterstreamWrite;

System.Net.ServicePointservicePt;

System.Net.WebHeaderCollection headers = new System.Net.WebHeaderCollection();

 

Processing Of API Call

Now let’s jump to the code that will get the data from a REST based API.

//This line gives the user control to run unmanaged and managed code

newInteropPermission(InteropKind::ClrInterop).assert();

// Create Object for adding headers

headers = new System.Net.WebHeaderCollection();

 

clrObj = System.Net.WebRequest::Create(‘https://test.com/rest_services/v1/endpoint’);

webReq = clrObj;

//Set Method Type

webReq.set_Method(“GET”);

webReq.set_KeepAlive(true);

// Set Content type

webReq.set_ContentType(“application/xml”);

// Add Authorization code

headers.Add(“Authorization”, “sdfgvczzxcbtyfrvb”);

//Add header to request

webReq.set_Headers(headers);

//Get Service Point

servicePt = webReq.get_ServicePoint();

servicePt.set_Expect100Continue(false);

//Gets the response object

webRes = webReq.GetResponse();

//Get Stream

stream = webRes.GetResponseStream();

streamRead = new System.IO.StreamReader(stream);

stream.Close();

webRes.Close();

With the help of this code we can easily get the data stream from an external API. In m next post we’ll discuss the POST and PUT methods we can use for this.

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