First TTN payload to the cloud

For my HTTP Integration I need to securely forward messages to an Azure IoT Hub or Azure IoT Central. This “nasty” console application loads a sample The Things Network(TTN) message from a file, connects the specified Azure IOT Hub, reformats the payload and sends it.

I couldn’t use System.Text.Json to construct the message payload as JsonDocument is not modifable(Sept2020). I had to rewrite my code to use Json.Net from Newtonsoft instead.

static async Task Main(string[] args)
{
   string filename ;
   string azureIoTHubconnectionString;
   DeviceClient azureIoTHubClient;
   Payload payload;
   JObject telemetryDataPoint = new JObject();

...
   filename = args[0];
   azureIoTHubconnectionString = args[1];

   try
   {
      payload = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Payload>(File.ReadAllText(filename));

      JObject payloadFields = (JObject)payload.payload_fields;

      using (azureIoTHubClient = DeviceClient.CreateFromConnectionString(azureIoTHubconnectionString, TransportType.Amqp))
      {
         await azureIoTHubClient.OpenAsync();

         foreach (JProperty child in payloadFields.Children())
         {
            EnumerateChildren(telemetryDataPoint, child);
         }
               
         using (Message message = new Message(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(telemetryDataPoint))))
         {
            Console.WriteLine(" {0:HH:mm:ss} AzureIoTHubDeviceClient SendEventAsync start", DateTime.UtcNow);
            await azureIoTHubClient.SendEventAsync(message);
            Console.WriteLine(" {0:HH:mm:ss} AzureIoTHubDeviceClient SendEventAsync finish", DateTime.UtcNow);
         }

         await azureIoTHubClient.CloseAsync();
      }
   }
   catch (Exception ex)
   {            
      Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
   }

   Console.WriteLine("Press <enter> to exit");
   Console.ReadLine();
   return;
}

static void EnumerateChildren(JObject jobject, JToken token)
{
   if (token is JProperty property)
   {
      if (token.First is JValue)
      {
         jobject.Add(property.Name, property.Value);
      }
      else
      {
         JObject parentObject = new JObject();
         foreach (JToken token2 in token.Children())
         {
            EnumerateChildren(parentObject, token2);
            jobject.Add(property.Name, parentObject);
          }
     }
   }
   else
   {
      foreach (JToken token2 in token.Children())
      {
         EnumerateChildren(jobject, token2);
      }
   }
}

To connect to an Azure IoT Hub I copied the connection string from the portal.

Retrieving a connection string for a device connected to Azure IoT Central (without using the Device Provisioning Service(DPS)) is a bit more involved. There is a deprecated command line application dps-keygen which calls the DPS with a device ID , device SAS key and scope ID and returns a connection string.

Using Azure IoT Explorer I could see reformatted JSON messages from my client application.

These two approached are fine for testing but wouldn’t scale well and would be painful to use it there were 1000s, 100s or even 10s of devices.