c-sharp-quickstart.md

Quickstart: Project Answer Search query in C#

The following C# example creates and sends a query for information about the third law of calculus.

Prerequisites

You will need Visual Studio 2017 or later to run this code on Windows. (The free Community Edition will work.)

Get an access key for the free trial Cognitive Research Technologies

Code scenario

The following C# code creates and sends the query.

It is implemented in the following steps:

1. Declare variables to specify the endpoint and a query URL to preview.
2. Create the request.
3. Add the Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key header.
4. Run the Web request asynchronously.
5. Read the response.
6. Print the headers and JSON results to the console.

Source code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace Answers_csharp
{
    class Program
    {
        // Replace the accessKey string value with your valid access key.
        const string accessKey = "YOUR-SUBSCRIPTION-KEY";

        const string uriBase = "https://api.labs.cognitive.microsoft.com/answerSearch/v7.0/search"; 

        const string searchTerm = "third law of calculus"; 

        // Used to return news search results including relevant headers
        struct SearchResult
        {
            public String jsonResult;
            public Dictionary<String, String> relevantHeaders;
        }

        static void Main()
        {
            Console.OutputEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;
            Console.WriteLine("Searching locally for: " + searchTerm);

            SearchResult result = BingLocalSearch(searchTerm);

            Console.WriteLine("\nRelevant HTTP Headers:\n");
            foreach (var header in result.relevantHeaders)
                Console.WriteLine(header.Key + ": " + header.Value);

            Console.WriteLine("\nJSON Response:\n");
            Console.WriteLine(JsonPrettyPrint(result.jsonResult));

            Console.Write("\nPress Enter to exit ");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Does Bing knowledge search and returns the results as a SearchResult.
        /// </summary>
        static SearchResult BingLocalSearch(string searchQuery)
        {
            // Construct the URI of the search request
            var uriQuery = uriBase + "?q=" + Uri.EscapeDataString(searchQuery) + "&mkt=en-us";

            // Send the Web request and get the response.
            WebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create(uriQuery);
            request.Headers["Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key"] = accessKey; 

            HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponseAsync().Result;
            string json = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();

            // Create result object for return
            var searchResult = new SearchResult();
            searchResult.jsonResult = json;
            searchResult.relevantHeaders = new Dictionary<String, String>();

            // Extract Bing HTTP headers
            foreach (String header in response.Headers)
            {
                if (header.StartsWith("BingAPIs-") || header.StartsWith("X-MSEdge-"))
                    searchResult.relevantHeaders[header] = response.Headers[header];
            }

            return searchResult;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Formats the given JSON string by adding line breaks and indents.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="json">The raw JSON string to format.</param>
        /// <returns>The formatted JSON string.</returns>
        static string JsonPrettyPrint(string json)
        {
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(json))
                return string.Empty;

            json = json.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "").Replace("\t", "");

            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            bool quote = false;
            bool ignore = false;
            int offset = 0;
            int indentLength = 3;

            foreach (char ch in json)
            {
                switch (ch)
                {
                    case '"':
                        if (!ignore) quote = !quote;
                        break;
                    case '\'':
                        if (quote) ignore = !ignore;
                        break;
                }

                if (quote)
                    sb.Append(ch);
                else
                {
                    switch (ch)
                    {
                        case '{':
                        case '[':
                            sb.Append(ch);
                            sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);
                            sb.Append(new string(' ', ++offset * indentLength));
                            break;
                        case '}':
                        case ']':
                            sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);
                            sb.Append(new string(' ', --offset * indentLength));
                            sb.Append(ch);
                            break;
                        case ',':
                            sb.Append(ch);
                            sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);
                            sb.Append(new string(' ', offset * indentLength));
                            break;
                        case ':':
                            sb.Append(ch);
                            sb.Append(' ');
                            break;
                        default:
                            if (ch != ' ') sb.Append(ch);
                            break;
                    }
                }
            }

            return sb.ToString().Trim();
        }

    }
}

Running the application

To run the application:

1. Create a new Console solution in Visual Studio.
2. Replace Program.cs with the provided code.
3. Replace the YOUR-ACCESS-KEY value with a valid access key for your subscription.
4. Run the program.

Next steps

Java quickstart