Asynchronously calling the REST Service with JSON

See Also: irServer - Rule Execution Service

The following example demonstrates calling the irServer - Rule Execution Service REST interface with a JSON based Entity State.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
  // The name of the ruleApp in the Catalog
  string ruleApp = "MortgageCalculator";

  // The address of the Rule Execution Service
  string ruleExecutionServiceURI = "http://localhost/InRuleRuleEngineService_v5.0.16/HttpService.svc";

  // The name of the Entity
  string entityName = "Mortgage";

  // The name of the RuleSet to execute, or use 'ApplyRules' if found to be null.
  string ruleSetName = "PaymentSummaryRules";

  // The entity state as a C# dynamic type
  dynamic entityState = new

  {
      LoanInfo = new
      {
          Principal = 53000m, APR = 7.625f, TermInYears = 15
      }
  };
  // A console application's main() entry point cannot be declared as async, so here
  // we are creating an Async task to execute the Async method, then we will wait on
  // the result.
  Task<string> httpTask = AsyncRestJsonCatalog(ruleExecutionServiceURI, ruleApp,
                                entityName, entityState, ruleSetName);

  // Calling the Result property of a Task object will block this thread until
  // the Task has had a chance to complete in it's worker thread.
  string httpTaskResult = httpTask.Result;

  // After this call you can inspect the raw result (as JSON) in resultJson, but note
  // that the EntityState will be serialized Json and must be decoded.
  dynamic resultJson = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(httpTaskResult);
  string entityJsonString = resultJson.EntityState;

  // Decode the serialized entity Json into a dynamic entity.
  dynamic entity = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(entityJsonString);
}
private async static Task<string> AsyncRestJsonCatalog(string ruleExecutionServiceURI, string ruleApp,
                  string ruleApplicationEntityName, dynamic entityStateObjectInput, string ruleSetName)
{
  // We use Newtonsoft's Json.Net library to convert this dynamic C# object to a JSON string
  string entityStateJsonInput = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(entityStateObjectInput);
  // New create the full request, inserting the JSON string that represents EntityState.
  dynamic requestData = new
  {
      RuleApp = new
      {
          RepositoryRuleAppRevisionSpec = new
          {
              RuleApplicationName = ruleApp
          }
      },
      EntityName = ruleApplicationEntityName,
      EntityState = entityStateJsonInput,
      RuleSetName = ruleSetName
  };
  string requestDataString = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(requestData);

  //If no ruleSetName exists, execute Auto rules, otherwise execute explicit rule.
  string postUri;
  if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ruleSetName))
  { postUri = ruleExecutionServiceURI + "/ApplyRules"; }
  else
  { postUri = ruleExecutionServiceURI + "/ExecuteRuleSet"; }

  // Our EntityState is encoded as JSON document, not XML.
  string mediaType = "application/json";

  // Async call to HttpClient with an HttpContent and wait for result.
  HttpContent content = new StringContent(requestDataString, Encoding.UTF8, mediaType);
  HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
  HttpResponseMessage response = await client.PostAsync(postUri, content);

  // Async convert the HttpResponseMessage's content to a string.
  string responsestring = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();

  // We're done, return result.
  return responsestring;
}