Brendan Tompkins [MVP]

I've been tasked with creating a control to display the current Homeland Security Threat Level on our site's home page.  Of course, I don't want to change anything when our threat level changes, so I went in search of a Web Service that gives me this information.  I couldn't find a SOAP service, but I did find this URL provided by the Department of Homleand Security, which gives an XML string containing the current threat level.

I created this following enumeration that represents the current condition, so that I can use this information from within our .NET framework.

public enum DHSAdvisoryLevel
{
    SEVERE,
    HIGH,
    ELEVATED,
    GUARDED,
    LOW,
    UNKNOWN
}

And this static method to parse the DHSA's XML and return my enum.

public static DHSAdvisoryLevel GetHomelandSecurityThreatLevel()
{
      DHSAdvisoryLevel currentLevel = DHSAdvisoryLevel.UNKNOWN;
      try
      {
            System.Xml.XmlDocument doc = new System.Xml.XmlDocument();
            doc.Load("http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition");
            System.Xml.XmlNodeList el = doc.GetElementsByTagName("THREAT_ADVISORY");
            string threatLevel = el[0].Attributes["CONDITION"].Value;
            currentLevel = (DHSAdvisoryLevel) Enum.Parse(typeof(DHSAdvisoryLevel), 
            threatLevel, true);
      }
      catch 
      { 
            // Do something here, if needed 
      }
      return currentLevel;
}