It is very common questions for new web developer how to get the client's country location to track the user.In various forum I
have faced this questions. So that today I want to share how to get client's country location,longitude,latitude,country code etc.
To get this you need to use a
free database which has IP to Location mapping
or
call a web service that does the same for you.
Using free web services is the easy way to get the location of the user based on its IP address. After goggling I have found the
following web service which provide this service absolutely free and that too without any complex interface to do the same.
http://freegeoip.appspot.com/
The above website provides
free IP Geolocation Web Service that returns data in three formats .
1.
XML [Extended Markup Language]
2.
CSV [Comma Separated Values]
3.
JSON [JavaScript Object Notation]
Here I am explaining how to get the data in XML format.
It is very easy to use this web service,just send your ip address through the URL
like:
http://freegeoip.appspot.com/xml/116.68.204.254
The returned XML with result are as below:
<Response>
<Status>true</Status>
<Ip>116.68.204.254</Ip>
<CountryCode>BD</CountryCode>
<CountryName>Bangladesh</CountryName>
<RegionCode>81</RegionCode>
<RegionName>Dhaka</RegionName>
<City>Dhaka</City>
<ZipCode/>
<Latitude>23.723</Latitude>
<Longitude>90.4086</Longitude>
How to consume this web service and get the result:
Here
WebRequest and
WebProxy is responsible for make call this url and xml response is received by
WebResponse and store it to dataset using
XMLTextReader.
Code:
private DataTable GetGeoLocation(string ipaddress)
{
//Create a WebRequest
WebRequest rssReq = WebRequest.Create("http://freegeoip.appspot.com/xml/"
+ ipaddress);
//Create a Proxy
WebProxy px =new WebProxy("http://freegeoip.appspot.com/xml/" + ipaddress, true);
//Assign the proxy to the WebRequest
rssReq.Proxy = px;
//Set the timeout in Seconds for the WebRequest
rssReq.Timeout = 2000;
try
{ //Get the WebResponse
WebResponse rep = rssReq.GetResponse();
//Read the Response in a XMLTextReader
XmlTextReader xtr = new XmlTextReader(rep.GetResponseStream());
//Create a new DataSet
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
//Read the Response into the DataSet
ds.ReadXml(xtr);
return ds.Tables[0];
}
catch
{
return null;
}
}
How to show result in aspx page:
You can place this code on Page_Load event or under any button event whenever you like:
Protected void ShowGeoLocatio()
{
string sIpaddress;
sIpaddress= Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"];
if(sIpaddress== "" || sIpaddress== null)
{
sIpaddress= Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"];
}
//call the function to consume web service and store result into datatable
DataTable odtGeoLocation = GetGeoLocation(sIpaddress);
if (odtGeoLocation != null)
{
if (odtGeoLocation .Rows.Count > 0)
{
lblCity.Text = odtGeoLocation .Rows[0]["City"].ToString();
lblRegion.Text = odtGeoLocation .Rows[0]["RegionName"].ToString();
lblCountry.Text = odtGeoLocation .Rows[0]["CountryName"].ToString();
lblCountryCode.Text = odtGeoLocation .Rows[0]["CountryCode"].ToString();
}
else
{
lblError="Sorry,no data found!!";
}
}
}
Hope that it may helps the developer.Thanks.
