I have a http request call that return a url . If I run this url in IE it returns a page that redirects to a another page and downloads the excel file.
How can I abstract this whole process in a c# Api tha will deal with http request + response + redirect + file_downlaod in a method and evetually return the file or the file stream.
thanks for the help.
Here is some [dated] code that follows all redirects until it hits a real page. You'll want to use more modern APIs to make web requests but the principle is the same.
/// \<summary\>
/// Follow any redirects to get back to the original URL
/// \</summary\>
private string UrlLengthen(string url)
{
string newurl = url;
bool redirecting = true;
while (redirecting)
{
try
{
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(newurl);
request.AllowAutoRedirect = false;
request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U;Windows NT 6.1; en - US; rv: 1.9.1.3) Gecko / 20090824 Firefox / 3.5.3(.NET CLR 4.0.20506)";
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
if ((int)response.StatusCode == 301 || (int)response.StatusCode == 302)
{
string uriString = response.Headers["Location"];
Log.Debug("Redirecting " + newurl + " to " + uriString + " because " + response.StatusCode);
newurl = uriString;
// and keep going
}
else
{
Log.Debug("Not redirecting " + url + " because " + response.StatusCode);
redirecting = false;
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
ex.Data.Add("url", newurl);
Exceptions.ExceptionRecord.ReportCritical(ex);
redirecting = false;
}
}
return newurl;
}
You may consider using WebRequest / WebClient classes.
Here you have some examples.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webrequest%28VS.80%29.aspx
