I’ve recently been developing a application for the car industry, to record vehicles, models, customer information, vehicle sales and storage of images etc. This is ASP.NET Blazor application which utilises Entity Framework Core, Microsoft Azure, Azure Web sites and Azure storage. One of the features I thought would really be interesting is for the car sales administrators to enter new vehicles into their stock and then dynamically have a component which allows them to query the vehicle information via the DVLA VES Web API.

Sometimes, to start with developing a component, I develop the component code outside of Blazor i.e. a Console application which can contains all the response structure, associated methods and calls the VES API with a HTTP client.

Now that I am finished with the basics of calling the VES web API, I can now expand this with all the necessary error handling e.g. HTTP error codes, and include this as a component within the Blazor application.

I’ve published the ASP.NET console application in my GitHub repo in the link below. You will need to request a VES API key and utilise your registrations, or set these as arguments in the console app, or just set a static string for this as it is in the current code.

DVLAConsoleAPICaller

If you prefer to perform a simpler test, I’ve provided a working PowerShell script below, you will just need to utilise your own API Key and set the registration as required.

$VehicleRegistrationNumber = "TE57VRN"
$APIKey = "[APIKEY]"
$DVLAURI = "https://driver-vehicle-licensing.api.gov.uk/vehicle-enquiry/v1/vehicles"
$Header = @{"x-api-key" = $APIKey} 
$RequestBody = @{"registrationNumber"= $VehicleRegistrationNumber} | ConvertTo-Json

Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Uri $DVLAURI -Body $RequestBody -ContentType "application/json" -Headers $Header