Apr 11 2017

Switch to read JSON vs raw HTML

Category: C# � Administrator @ 18:00

I've maintained a Windows Phone application since the early days of Windows Phone 7 and it has served well for over six years.  If you read my earlier posts you'll see that the application was based upon a targets' website raw html pages.  The basis of the application was to pull the data from out  (scrape) of the resulting web pages and give a better experience for phone users.  I did this since the website was a complete disaster when trying to use it from the desktop and a failure when trying it on any smaller form factor like a phone.

Well, as expected, the website has finally re-engineered the set of pages that were used to scrape data from used in the phone application.  So taking a look at the re-engineered data I see that the website has taken a path to a more modern, reactive framework.  Lucky for me it looks like they have gone the route of delivering the data in one JSON payload.

So for me, I'm going to redo my code to pull out the JSON data and blow it into my observable collection. 

I need to setup a new Windows 10 64-bit box and all the other bits to get back on track like Fiddler/VS2012/Source Repository and the Phone SDK.

I'll detail what things I find when re-doing to read the JSON data rather than the raw HTML pages.

Should be fun.

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