Drupal 7 Services 3 REST Server C Sharp Example

I have been doing a lot of work lateley in the Windows Presentation Foundation(wpf) in my favorite .NET language, c#. As with many projects, I like to incorporate the Drupal content management system. With Services 3 you have to throw your knowledge of previous Drupal Services out the window. There is no service browser and several paradigms have changed. After examining REST vs the XMLRPC server I decided to focus on REST because it is just like POSTing and GETing data to/from web forms, in combination with specific url schemes. I've created a demo application that will allow people to test out the REST server....at the time of writing anyway. Here are a couple of points about services 3.

Login

In Services 3 logged in state is determined by a cookie that the login method returns if valid credentials are provided. There is no system.connect needed. People used to legacy Drupal Services will probably find this really annoying...I kind of did. However it conforms to the same behavior as other popular API's like Facebook and Twitter. This is a POST request.

In this example, by default there is no cookie management when using the HttpWebRequest so we utilize a CookieContainer.

Logout

Logout is also handled by a POST. You can call it as many times as you want, but it will only return a valid result if you currently have a valid cookie.

The example was created using using Visual C# 2010 Express and compiled for an x86 target. Take a close look at the source code and you may happen to stumble uppon several other examples. If you have any questions, please use the comments and I'll be happy to help.

Example Download

Download the Executable Sample

Download the C# Project