Using RestSharp for Rest API GET

I arrived safe and sound in Prague for the Autodesk cloud accelerator.

Before leaving Switzerland, I took a last little jaunt in nature, over Weissenstein and Rueti, with a nice view of the Swiss alps:

During the trip, I continued to convert my FireRatingCloud C# REST API client from HttpWebRequest to RestSharp.

I implemented the RestSharp PUT call last week; now, let's address the GET call, and remove all traces of the use of HttpWebRequest.

The REST GET call implementation using RestSharp is almost ridiculously simple:

  /// <summary>
  /// GET JSON document data from 
  /// the specified mongoDB collection.
  /// </summary>
  public static string Get(
    string collection_name_and_id )
  {
    var client = new RestClient( RestApiBaseUrl );
 
    var request = new RestRequest( _api_version + "/"
      + collection_name_and_id, Method.GET );
 
    IRestResponse response = client.Execute( request );
 
    var content = response.Content; // raw content as string
 
    return content;
  }

I had no Internet connection during my travel, so I switched back from the mongolab-hosted database to a local repository instead, and the heroku-hosted node.js web server to a local one as well.

The code includes a toggle for each, by setting the static bool UseLocalServer in FireRatingCloud/Util.cs for the web server, and the appropriate database URL in firerating/server.js like this:

// local database
var mongo_uri = 'mongodb://localhost/firerating';

// mongolab hosted
var mongo_uri = 'mongodb://revit:revit@ds047742.mongolab.com:47742/firerating';

I ran into one more little problem starting up the mongo database locally, due to lack of hard disk space after compacting the virtual Windows machine hard drive:

C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Server\3.0\bin\mongod.exe

2015-09-13T10:56:51.383+0200 E JOURNAL  [initandlisten] Insufficient free space for journal files
2015-09-13T10:56:51.383+0200 I JOURNAL  [initandlisten] Please make at least 3379MB available in C:\data\db\journal or use --smallfiles

Checking the mongo help information about disk space usage, I see a number of promising options available, e.g.

  --noprealloc          disable data file preallocation - will often hurt performance
  --nssize arg (=16)    .ns file size (in MB) for new databases
  --quota               limits each database to a certain number of files (8 default)
  --smallfiles          use a smaller default file size
  --nojournal           disable journaling (journaling is on by default for 64 bit)

The mongo database was perfectly happy to run locally again with the minimised disk size using:

C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Server\3.0\bin > mongod --smallfiles --nojournal

The updated versions of FireRatingCloud are release 2016.0.0.9 implementing the new Get method and 2016.0.0.10 after removing the obsolete HttpWebRequest QueryOrUpsert method and the .NET references it requires.