Coding4Fun

Building Classes for YouTube Feeds and Videos

Now that you've seen how the YouTube API works, we will show how you can represent the data types from the YouTube API as .NET classes (see Figure 4-5).

InnerTubeTime

This is an enumeration that represents the possible time parameter values we can pass in to YouTube. We'll use this in the InnerTubeService class as an optional parameter to pass into YouTube's API.

InnerTubeFeed

This class represents a specific video feed, such as the Top Rated videos. The Feed Name is a user-friendly name describing the feed, and the URL points to a YouTube API like the ones listed earlier.

InnerTubeVideo

This class represents a single YouTube video and includes most of the fields we get from YouTube (author, comments, categories), as well as a set of download properties that point to the location indicating where that video is stored on disk (once we download it).

Figure 4-5. YouTube's API as .NET classes

Strings or Uri Classes?

You may have noticed that the InnerTubeVideo class uses strings rather than the Uri class to store URLs. In general, using the Uri class is the preferred mechanism for storing URLs, but InnerTube needs to serialize (save) its classes to your hard drive using the XmlSerializer class. Unfortunately, the Uri class is not serializable and will throw an exception if you attempt to serialize a Uri class, because Uri does not provide a parameter-less ...