Hello, I'm looking for ways to detect/estimate the country from which a http-request is coming in ASP.NET.
I know there are some solutions with services/country lookups but I never used one.
I'm looking for small/clean solutions.
It's for helping someone filling out a form so it does not have to be 100% accurate.
Thanks in advance..
If you choose to use the REMOTE_ADDR server variable, you can be fairly certain that the IP that you recover accurately represents the nation of origin of that user. It is fairly uncommon for a user to be accessing the Internet from outside of the country that he is currently in, with a few notable exceptions, such as those who choose to surf though an anonymous proxy server, such as is discussed below. If, however, you want to get the state that a user is coming from, or authenticate the identity of a user, you're out of luck as far as any even remotely reliable method is concerned.
More info here.
You can use one of available web services to match an incoming request to a country.
Otherwise you may decide to grab the MaxMind database file (GeoLite Country), read from this file in your application and perform a match. Thus you will be independent from a third-party service, only pulling regularly updates for the database file.
Also check out similar questions:
You can make a simple HTTP request to this URL:
http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=207.46.197.32
using the value of the REMOTE_ADDR server variable. That will return the country and city like this:
Country: UNITED STATES (US)
City: Redmond, WA
I use that service for a web form just as you describe. Occasionally it doesn't know the answer, but usually it's very good (and it's free and simple 8-)
In C#, you can use System.Net.WebRequest.Create to read from the URL.