The LiveSDK team has a bunch of exciting samples demonstrating using JavaScript along with HTML, C# with XAML to build apps that integrate Live services. Sadly however, a full blown C++ sample is missing from the lot as I write this today. Last week I built a proof of concept sample PhotoViewer app as part of writing samples for my upcoming book on building Windows 8 Apps using C++ and XAML. What follows below is a summary post on how to consume JSON APIs in C++.

Windows Runtime has built in APIs to support JSON APIs: both building objects based on responses from web services like the Live service in our case and then parse the object collection to build desired features. The namespace Windows::Data::Json namespace contains a list of APIs that make JSON consumption a breeze. The various classes and types that form part of this namespace are listed below:

1. IJsonValue
2. JsonArray
3. JsonError
4. JsonErrorStatus enumeration
5. JsonObject
6. JsonValue
7. JsonValueType enumeration.

In order to make successful requests to Live services, it is recommended to have users sign in using “Microsoft Accounts”. Purchasing and downloading apps from the Windows Store needs users to sign in with Microsoft Account. Having such an account also enables single sign on for all Microsoft services. We will explore the process of triggering a sign in operation in a later blog post. For today, we focus on making requests to the skydrive APIs.

Fetching Album data from Skydrive

The Live Services team built a great “test” portal for testing various Live APIs here.  The first web request to fetch a list of album data is to make a GET request to the base API url at http://apis.live.net/v5.0/me/albums and append an authentication token. This token is initially obtained when the user signs in to the Live OAuth authentication API. For our C++ code to make a successful web request, we rely on XHR (Xml Http Request). The LiveSDK samples on GitHub have a helper class called XHREvent and we will rely on the same. Our code to make a web request looks like this:

 1: std::wstring url = PhotoSkyCpp::BaseApiUrl + L"/me/albums" + SampleDataSource::GetAccessTokenParameter();

 2: SendRequest(

 3:     ref new Uri(ref new String(url.c_str())),

 4:     "GET",

 5:     ref new XHRDataReceivedHandler(this, &SampleDataSource::OnDataAvailable),

 6:     ref new XHRCompletedHandler(this, &SampleDataSource::OnGetAlbumDataCompleted),

 7:     ref new XHRFailedHandler(this, &SampleDataSource::OnSendRequestFailed));

The SendRequest function accepts a URL, an action verb, which in our case is “GET” and three callback functions, one for notifying if data is available, one for the data fetch completion status and finally a callback to handle request send failures.

For the case of our discussion, we will ignore both the OnDataAvailable and OnSendRequestFailed functions. When the Live API sends a response to our “/me/albums” request, it does so in JSON format. This response is passed back to the OnGetAlbumDataCompleted handler and we will build our JSON objects here.

In order to build a Json Object successfully from a web response such as Live service, we first need to initialize the Json object as follows:

 1: JsonObject^ tokenResponse = ref new JsonObject();

The JsonObject class listed above has a static function named TryParse that accepts a string and a reference to a JsonObject type that can be initialized with the said response string.

 1: if (JsonObject::TryParse(responseString, &tokenResponse))

 2: {

 3:     ... use the JsonObject tokenResponse

 4: }

Once the JsonObject is initialized successfully, we obtain a read-only collection of the Json Objects. The next step is parsing this collection for the data key. For a valid Json object view, a data key must be present. The Lookup method on the IMapView collection returns a IJsonValue^ associated with the data key. The next step is to obtain a string representation of the series of Jsonvalues by calling the Stringify method on the IJsonValue^ obtained from the previous step.

 1: auto map = tokenResponse->GetView();

 2: IJsonValue^ value = map->Lookup("data");

 3: String^ s = value->Stringify();

The final step is to iterate over the collection of items present in this string and do whatever is needed for your app.

 1: JsonArray^ mapValue = ref new JsonArray();

 2: if (JsonArray::TryParse(s, &mapValue))

 3: {

 4:     auto vec = mapValue->GetView();

 5:     std::for_each(begin(vec), end(vec), [this](IJsonValue^ M)

 6:     {

 7:         Name = M->GetObject()->GetNamedString("name");

 8:         ID = M->GetObject()->GetNamedString("id");

 9:         //Do specific operations using the Name and ID properties

 10:     });

 11: }

This is a very simplified introduction to using the JSON APIs in Windows Runtime and consume the same from C++.

Enjoy!!!