Xamarin.Tips – Sending Authorized SignalR Requests

In my last post, I talked about creating a CookieProvider for handling OAuth Bearer Tokens from an HTTP Cookie. Now that we have this capability, we can make a secure connection to SignalR using a Cookie store rather than adding our tokens to the Authorization HTTP Header.

By using cookies instead of the HTTP Header, we can now use a full Websocket connection rather than being forced into long polling. Using websockets increases speed of messages received and messages sent.

So here’s the quick bit of code for making a secure SignalR Websocket connection:

SignalRConnectionService.cs

    public class SignalRConnectionService
    {
        private HubConnection _connection;
        public IHubProxy AppHubProxy { get; set; }

        public SignalRConnectionService()
        {
            _connection = new HubConnection(YOUR_SIGNALR_URL);
            AppHubProxy = _connection.CreateHubProxy("AppHub");
        }

        public async Task StartAsync()
        {
            try
            {
                if(_connection.State != ConnectionState.Disconnected)
                {
                    _connection.Stop();
                }
                _connection.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
                _connection.CookieContainer.Add(new Uri(THE_BASE_URL_OF_YOUR_SERVER), new Cookie("BearerToken", YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN));
                await _connection.Start();
               
        }
        public void Stop()
        {
            _connection.Stop();
        }
    }

Now we have the full speed of websockets enabled in our Xamarin, Mac, and Windows applications!

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