Consuming REST services using Visual Studio 2010

Aetna is dipping its toe into public facing APIs via Carepass.  I signed up for a license and wanted to see how easy it was to consume some HHS drug data found here.  I first checked a GET inside a browser with the following uri:

https://api.carepass.com/hhs-directory-api/drugs/search?name=Cymbalta&apikey=xxx

and I got my results:

I then fired up Visual Studio to see how easy it would be to make a REST WCF call.  Turns out, there is not a way to add-> service reference like you can with SOAP.  This means I am turning back the clock of HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse.  Interestingly, there are not very good examples on Stackoverflow and MSDN about consuming non-WCF REST services.  The best example I found was here on Yahoo!

I created a simple ConsoleApp (changed it target runtime from client profile to full .NET 4.0) and launched into code:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Uri address = new Uri(@"https://api.carepass.com/hhs-directory-api/drugs/search?name=Cymbalta&apikey=t8bnhyvu9hj7eh4c8tg97jgb");   
    HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(address) as HttpWebRequest;   
    request.Method = "POST";   
    request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";   

    using (HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)   
    {   
        StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());   
        Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd());   
    }

    Console.ReadKey();
}

Sure enough, it worked like a charm:

So then the next problem – how to I parse this blob of name/value pairs?  And is there hierarchical data in there?  I first thought (hoped) it would be easy – just split by the ‘:’

using (HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)   
{
    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
    String output = reader.ReadToEnd();
    Console.WriteLine("Response was: " + output.Length);
    String[] splitOutput = output.Split(':');
    foreach (String item in splitOutput)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(item);
    }
}

No dice:

I then switched my delimited to a comma:

That is actually better.  The next thing is seems is to check to see if the comma is inside the double quotes.  I know that the industry is going to REST from SOAP – but this is so much worse than adding a reference in Visual Studio….