Windows Azure Authentication for Bing Search in Objective-C - objective-c

Question

On 01.08.12 Bing modified their search api to a Azure, How can I authenticate in Objective-C to use the new bing search api from Azure?
My best guess is to learn from the provided PHP example in the migration word document!! http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=248077 (Oh god, can't you setup a web page!) or this Java Question - Bing Search API Azure Marketplace Authentication in Java

Answer 1

I'm using ASIHTTPRequest to authenticate with following code.
NSString *queryString = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"'%#'", queryString];
queryString = [queryString urlEncodeUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]; //You'll have to implement url encoding method, preferably in a string category file
NSString *urlString = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Data.ashx/Bing/Search/v1/Image?Query=%#&Market='en-US'&$top=50&$format=json", queryString];
ASIHTTPRequest *request = [ASIHTTPRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:urlString] ];
[request setAuthenticationScheme:(NSString *)kCFHTTPAuthenticationSchemeBasic];
[request setUsername:#"YOUR_KEY_HERE"];
[request setPassword:#"YOUR_KEY_HERE"];
[request setDelegate:self];
[request startAsynchronous];
Please note, no appID required. just instead pass your key as username and password. It is successfully getting the data.
However, can't really convert the data to NSString. tried every encoding but can't get the string from the data. Initial googling says it's UTF-8 encoded. But no success.
For above code to work, you must add ASIHTTP framework.
Another thing is, my guess is passing base64 encoded string with this format your_key:yourkey should also work with basic authentication.

Answer 2

I was able to get it to work using just NSUrlConnection. You must first base64encode
NSString *keyString = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"%#:%#", BING_SEARCH_API_KEY, BING_SEARCH_API_KEY];
NSData *plainTextData = [keyString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSString *base64String = [plainTextData base64EncodedString];
Setup your request
NSMutableURLRequest *req = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] init];
[req setURL:[NSURL URLWithString:searchUrl]];
NSString *authValue = [NSString stringWithFormat:#"Basic %#", base64String];
[req setValue:authValue forHTTPHeaderField:#"Authorization"];
Make the request
NSError *error = [[NSError alloc] init];
NSHTTPURLResponse *response = nil;
NSData *data = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:req returningResponse:&response error:&error];
Look at the documentation about how to form searchUrl, and then process data according to the format you specified in $format= (I used json, so mine looks like):
NSDictionary *json = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:data options:NSJSONReadingMutableContainers error:&error];
I left out error handling, dont forget to add that by checking response as well as error.