.NET C# Object Library for Magento's XML-RPC API

We recently built a Magento connector for our Customer Management Module. While building this connector we noticed a significant lack of information about how to work with the Magento API on the .NET platform.

Our first choice was to use the SOAP API because Visual Studio has wonderful support for SOAP. However, after jumping through many hoops, the best we could do was add the Web Reference but after that it was unusable. Apparently the SOAP API is not totally compliant with all the standards VS was hoping for. To go any further would have required hacking the core files and that was not an option for us to do as we could not possibly require all our clients start hacking their core files. EDIT : As of v1.3 there is a second WSDL that reportedly has support for vs 2008. Call it like so http://%3chost%3e/%3Cmagento%3E/api/v2_soap?wsdl

We then turned to the XML-RPC API and were able to start building out our object library. We found that the documentation for the API was very poor and often wrong at times wrt to the type of values it was returning. Almost everything goes in and out as strings which still baffles us. The filter parameters that get passed in are not documentated anywhere that we could find so we pretty much just took educated guesses to find what we could. Eventually we saw patterns in the inconsistencies, which were, at least, consistently inconsistent.

Overall Magento really is a stellar eCommerce solution. The checkout process is one of the finest we've ever seen. So even though we really only needed to read the orders object, we went a head and built out the full object library with samples to every object and method. We're making it publicly available here under the MIT X11 license. We've used Charles Cook's XML-RPC.NET libary which is also published under the MIT X11 license.

We did need to modify Cook's library as the Magento XML-RPC API uses extensions for null values. These values come back as <nil /> and will throw a nullreference exception. We found two ways to handle this. First is to search/replace the xml as it comes back. The other is to catch the null reference exception when working with the properties. In our testing the search/replace method was much more efficient but YMMV.

The source for our object library and samples is published here along with the source for Cook's XML-RPC.NET library that includes both hacks for the NULL values.

If you are receiving the error about calling parameters not matching signature then your problem is most likely eAccelerator. We found that after disabling eAccelerator or adding a filter for the url "Api/*.php" the error goes away. Apparently eAcclerator is causing a parameter validation exception to be thrown. If eAccelerator has the API cached then the login call with throw error. Otherwise you will be able to login but the second call with throw exception. Subsequent calls with throw exception until eAcclerator releases it's cache.

Comments

March 1, 2009 08:13 by Nick Tulip

I was having some issues dealing with a php xmlrpc service (not magento) where the member names were dynamic in some instances and I used the Util.ClassPropertyBuilder function in your code. Worked perfect for all other methods, but the dynamic member name ones.

It would turn a struct whos member name was dynamic into a string field when the class was generated.

Not sure if this mattered to you guys but your class was a lot of help to me.

THanks
Nick

March 5, 2009 13:01 by Tassos

Hi,

Thanks for that. I am a newbie in the Magento Api. Would I ask two much if I asked for a sample C# application that actually uses your Ez.Newsletter.MagentoApi?

Thanks in advance

July 14, 2009 08:48 by Matt

Nah, the new SOAP URL produces a blank service reference as well. Thanks so much for publishing your code.

And Linux folk talking about their open and standards-based code have obviously never tried to interoperate with it. This is the second time I've got burnt by pitiful Linux web services this month.

July 14, 2009 10:01 by serdar guner

Hi,

Thanks for this amazing api.
How can find CustomerAddress id for update address to the this api.
CustomerAddress.List does not contain AddressId.

Thanks for your advenced

August 22, 2009 04:10 by Darryl Killingsworth

Hi,

First, thank you for posting your magentoapi interface. I have a c# application I wrote to import items from an XML file to a magento store using your api functions. The application has been working well; however, operations like product.updates have started to take a long time due to the size of the database. I am now getting a timeout: "System.net.WebException: The operation has timed out" at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()" Changing the <httpRuntime executionTimeout="300"/> in the web.config did not help. I perform the same update from the magento admin and it takes around 140 seconds. The product.update from my application from your api times out at about 110 seconds. How can I increase the this timeout?

Appreciate you help in advance.

August 27, 2009 13:23 by Ciaran

Hi

Excellent api it really helped me. There is section I cannot get working. I cannot find the GetCustomerAddresses method mentioned in the line below. Have you got the code for this?
Thanks

CustomerAddress[] myCustomerAddresses = MagentoApi.CustomerAddress.GetCustomerAddresses(apiUrl, sessionId, Convert.ToInt32(myCustomer.customer_id));

September 6, 2009 20:55 by wow power leveling reviews

Thanks for sharing this info guys. This helps me figuring out some things that I need to do!

September 15, 2009 04:10 by Bruno Alexandre

First of all, thank you all for the work, it is a lovely library...

Secondly I will add: Isn't this better at CodePlex?

October 15, 2009 19:08 by Ric

Hi There. Your code is really useful. But when i try to include our own site in the URL, I'm getting the "session has expired. please relogin" error. Any thoughts? Thanks a lot.

November 7, 2009 13:55 by Jin

Thanks very much for your hard work, and kindly post your work.

November 23, 2009 05:59 by Marcus Ripkens

Hello,

i have a problem with a call in C#:

OrderInfo myOrderInfo = Order.Info(apiUrl, sessionId, new object[] { OrderRow.increment_id });

The shipping_address sometimes returns a struct and sometimes an array of structs.

How can that be handled?

If it contains an array of structs like OrderAddress[] it trows an error.
I can fix that by declaring OrderAddress as OrderAddress[] in OrderInfo.cs but then i receive an error fetching another order wich does not contain an array of structs but only a struct.

I am stuck, please help

December 1, 2009 12:22 by Mark

Thank you for releasing this library it's excactly what I needed to escape from Magentos structure. Do you by any chance know how to add products which have attribute sets? I want to set some custom options but Im not sure how.

Kind regards,
Mark

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