Configuration

To configure the Kaggle API client functionality, the KaggleConfiguration class exists.

var config = new KaggleConfiguration { username = "YourUsername", key = "YourKey" };

var api = new KaggleClient(config);

We won't cover every possible configuration in this part, head over to the specific guides for that in Authentication.

HttpClient Notes

One important part of the configuration is the used HttpClient. By default, every time Authenticate() is called on KaggleClient, a new HttpClient is created in the background. For Web Applications that require a lot of different clients due to user based access tokens, it is not advised to create a new HttpClient from scratch with every HTTP call. Instead, a default (static) HttpClient should be used to create a new KaggleClient with a new access token.

Consider the following HTTP Endpoint:

HttpResponseMessage Get()
{
    var config = new KaggleConfiguration { username = "YourUsername", key = "YourKey" };

    var api = new KaggleClient(); 
    api.Authenticate(config);
}

This creates a new HttpClient every time a request is made, which can be quite bad for the performance. Instead, we should use a static HttpClient:

// somewhere global/static
public static HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient();

HttpResponseMessage Get()
{
    var config = new KaggleConfiguration { username = "YourUsername", key = "YourKey" };

    var api = new KaggleClient();
    api.Authenticate(httpClient, config);
}

This way, a single HttpClient will be used.

HttpClient Notes​

HttpClient Notes