Finding clients location in an ASP.NET page

Question

How to find clients location in my ASP.NET page? In fact I used System.Globalization.RegionInfo.CurrentRegion, but it is showing the setting in the control panel. So can I find the exact location using any method?

Answer 1

Not that it would give you 100% accuracy, but you can use hostip.info

They provide an API that gives you the location of an IP address that you pass them via HTTP request. You can use a WebClient object to make calls to the API and parse the results. Scott Hanselman has a pretty great example in this blog article (my example below is based on his article). hostip.info's database is based on an open project that the community contributes IP locations to... so there is no guarantee to be correct.

For starters, you need to determine the client IP address as follows:

string ipaddress = HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"];

Once you have the IP, you can create a WebClient object and call the API...

Example API call:

string r;
using (var w = new WebClient())
{
    r = w.DownloadString(String.Format("http://api.hostip.info/?ip={0}&position=true", ipaddress));
}

The results will be XML that looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<HostipLookupResultSet version="1.0.0" xmlns="http://www.hostip.info/api" xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.hostip.info/api/hostip-1.0.0.xsd">
 <gml:description>This is the Hostip Lookup Service</gml:description>
 <gml:name>hostip</gml:name>
 <gml:boundedBy>
    <gml:Null>inapplicable</gml:Null>
 </gml:boundedBy>
 <gml:featureMember>
    <Hostip>
     <gml:name>Sugar Grove, IL</gml:name>
     <countryName>UNITED STATES</countryName>
     <countryAbbrev>US</countryAbbrev>
     <!-- Co-ordinates are available as lng,lat -->
     <ipLocation>
        <gml:PointProperty>
         <gml:Point srsName="http://www.opengis.net/gml/srs/epsg.xml#4326">
            <gml:coordinates>-88.4588,41.7696</gml:coordinates>
         </gml:Point>
        </gml:PointProperty>
     </ipLocation>
    </Hostip>
 </gml:featureMember>
</HostipLookupResultSet>

Answer 2

IPAddressExtensions is a free CodePlex class library if all you want is the country the IP address is located in.

It doesn't require a connection to another website, etc. And it's open source .. so go nuts ;)

Answer 3

You can guess country that the IP address belongs to by doing a lookup to client IP address. There are some pages that provide databases containing IP to country mapping tables., see here for example