Coffee to go

Sending form values with GET method is really easy just appened the URL with ? (question mark) followed with name,value pair but how to send values to the form with POST method? hmm this is what i was searching for few days ago and then i found HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse classes; It was my introduction with these classes.

Microsoft has made it really easy – just use httpWebRequest to make request and httpWebResponse to get response Voila! thats it!Have a look at the code below:

string GetResponseString(string Url, string postString)
{
    HttpWebRequest httpRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(Url);
    httpRequest.Method = "POST";
    httpRequest.UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)";
    httpRequest.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
    httpRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

    byte[] bytedata = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(postString);
    httpRequest.ContentLength = bytedata.Length;
    httpRequest.CookieContainer = ccContainer;

    Stream requestStream = httpRequest.GetRequestStream();
    requestStream.Write(bytedata, 0, bytedata.Length);
    requestStream.Close();

    HttpWebResponse httpWebResponse = (HttpWebResponse)httpRequest.GetResponse();
    Stream responseStream = httpWebResponse.GetResponseStream();
    ccContainer.Add(httpWebResponse.Cookies);
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(responseStream, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8))
    {
        string line;
        while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)
        {
            sb.Append(line);
        }
    }
    return sb.ToString();
}

Url is the location of page where form exists and poststring is basically of form name:value pair.
For example our page is located @ http://mytechblog.com/formResultpage.aspx, hosting a form with two input fields, named Field1 and Field2. In this case the the postString will be:

string postString = String.Format("field1={0}&field2={1}",
                 "Field 1 Value", "Field 2 Value");

GetResponseString() will return the response stream containing the page generated after form processing..

string szResult = GetResponseString(
                "http://mytechblog.com/formResultpage.aspx",postString);