Consuming the Holidaywebservice2 with Visual Studio 2010

The documentation provided on the web service site[^] is patchy to say the least, especially for ASP.NET. It only directs you to the generic MSDN web service walkthrough page. After a few fruitless hours of searching the internet for the best way to use the new HolidayWebService2[^], I managed to solve it myself.

For my purposes, marking a public holiday on a calendar object on a web form, I found this to be the best method. In this example, I am loading a local array from the published one for all the holidays in the current year.

1. Add the web service in VS 2010 by pasting http://www.holidaywebservice.com/HolidayService_v2/HolidayService2.asmx[^] into the web service dialog.
2. In your code behind page, add a one dimensional array to hold the data and an object for the service in your page declarations. Note the use of the web service to define the array type.

Public Class CalendarPage
    Inherits System.Web.UI.Page
    Public arrHolidays() As com.holidaywebservice.www.Holiday
    Dim wsHolidays As New com.holidaywebservice.www.HolidayService2

3. In your Page_Load event, add the code to load the data from the web service.

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, _
       ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
    If Not IsPostBack Then
        calCalendar.VisibleDate = _
            DateSerial(Year(DateTime.Today), Month(DateTime.Today), 1)
        GetHolidays(Year(DateTime.Today))
        .

4. Create the GetHolidays procedure for the current year. The first parameter defines the country code, in this case 1 = GreatBritain.

Private Sub GetHolidays(ByVal intYr As Integer)
    arrHolidays = wsHolidays.GetHolidaysForYear(1, intYr)
End Sub

5. Finally you can use the array in the day render code of the calendar control to put a border round the holiday day and set a tool tip to display its name, which is held in the Descriptor element. BankHoliday = 0 means that it is a 'Recognized' public holiday, 1 is used for notable dates such as Valentine's day, which is not a holiday.

Private Sub calCalendar_DayRender(ByVal sender As Object, _
        ByVal e As WebControls.DayRenderEventArgs) Handles calCalendar.DayRender
    Dim nextDate As DateTime
    e.Cell.BorderWidth = 3
    e.Cell.BorderColor = Drawing.Color.White
    For Each objHoliday As com.holidaywebservice.www.Holiday In arrHolidays
        If objHoliday.Date = e.Day.Date And objHoliday.BankHoliday = 0 Then
            e.Cell.BorderColor = Drawing.Color.Black
            e.Cell.ToolTip = String.Concat(e.Cell.ToolTip, " ", objHoliday.Descriptor)
        End If
    Next
End Sub

I hope this proves useful to anyone else using this web service.