HttpClient GET Request

Question

If I wanted to do a GET request for an API I want to use: https://mymarketnews.ams.usda.gov/mars-api/authentication how do I incorporate the authentication part to use my key for the request?

I am fairly new to this so I have been reading the documentation on HTTP client ( http://zetcode.com/csharp/httpclient/ ) and found what I think is what I am shooting for (C# HttpClient JSON request):

using System;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Net.Http.Headers;
using Newtonsoft.Json;

namespace HttpClientJson
{
    class Contributor
    {
        public string Login { get; set; }
        public short Contributions { get; set; }

        public override string ToString()
        {
            return $"{Login,20}: {Contributions} contributions";
        }
    }

    class Program
    {
        private static async Task Main()
        {
            using var client = new HttpClient();

            client.BaseAddress = new Uri("https://api.github.com");
            client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("User-Agent", "C# console program");
            client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Add(
                    new MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/json"));

            var url = "repos/symfony/symfony/contributors";
            HttpResponseMessage response = await client.GetAsync(url);
            response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
            var resp = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();

            List<Contributor> contributors = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<Contributor>>(resp);
            contributors.ForEach(Console.WriteLine);
        }
    }
} 

So my exact question is basically: In this type of JSON GET request, if I wanted to use this for my case would it be:

client.BaseAddress = new Uri("https://mymarketnews.ams.usda.gov");
var url = "https://marsapi.ams.usda.gov/services/v1.1/reports -H "Basic<Base64EncodedApiKey:>"";

where URL handles the bearer authentication? Or would that be in class contributor, I'm not sure i'd need that class in my case.

Answer 1

You would want to set the Authorization header of your HttpClient. So, using your example, you could add the following to your client setup:

client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Basic", "Your Base64 Encoded API key");