The UK Government have a useful web page for all of the UK’s National Holidays, such as Easter and Christmas. This can be found with the link here https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays. In addition to this, there is also a really handy public API, which is the JSON representation of the web page (Just add .json to the end of the URL).

I was recently writing an application where I needed to populate and store bank holidays in the system, so I wrote a simple helper to read the data from the API and populate the necessary tables. It is simple, but it is effective.

To generate the C# objects, I used Visual Studio’s really useful in-built conversion tool. This allows you to copy and paste the JSON straight from the source straight into the IDE. Visual Studio then auto-magically converts it to all the necessary C# objects and their dependencies. It’s by no means perfect in that you will need to do a bit of tidying up here and there, but it takes care of most of the effort involved.

 

 

In my example below, it uses Newtonsoft JSON.NET, which is a NUGET package. In order to use this you would need to right-mouse click on your project in Visual Studio and click ‘Manage Nuget packages’. From here, you should be able to search and add JSON.NET as a dependency. Once added, any reference errors can be rectified easily by using the shortcut key [ctrl] + [fullstop] over the offending line(s) of code.

// Using System.Net
// NewtonSoft JSON.NET
private static BankHolidays GetUkGovBankHolidays()
{
	string apiEndPoint = "https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json";
	BankHolidays apiHolidays = null;

	using (var wb = new WebClient())
	{
		wb.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
		string response = wb.DownloadString(apiEndPoint);
		apiHolidays = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(response);
	}

	
	return apiHolidays;
}

#region "Government UK Bank Holiday API Classes"
protected class BankHolidays
{
	[JsonProperty("england-and-wales")]
	public BankHolidayDivision EnglandAndWales { get; set; }

	[JsonProperty("scotland")]
	public BankHolidayDivision Scotland { get; set; }

	[JsonProperty("northern-ireland")]
	public BankHolidayDivision NorthernIreland { get; set; }
}

protected class BankHolidayDivision
{
	[JsonProperty("division")]
	public string Division { get; set; }

	[JsonProperty("events")]
	public List Events { get; set; }
}

protected class Event
{
	[JsonProperty("title")]
	public string Title { get; set; }

	[JsonProperty("date")]
	public DateTime Date { get; set; }

	[JsonProperty("notes")]
	public string Notes { get; set; }

	[JsonProperty("bunting")]
	public bool Bunting { get; set; }
}
#endregion

With the example provided it will produce a list of holidays for England/Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It will also include historic as well as future holidays. During my testing, it provided a range of 6 years behind and 1 year ahead.

 

Post Categories

• API
• Useful Methods