Question

I am calling a 3rd party object and passing parameters to the call

e.g. http://www.scripts/report.asp?companyname=Google

Currently after the call is done it prompts to open or to download the .txt file.

My question, how do I capture the response data into some memory object (xml) and not to show the prompt save/download file, I need to modify the data that is coming and then open the file.

please provide sample code if you know.

Thx

Answer 1

Use WebRequest to create an HTTP request, then get the stream, and then do something with the stream based on its contents. Many people use HtmlAgilityPack if it is HTML you are grabbing. If instead you are grabbing XML from the feed, you could deserialize the XML into an object model. To do this you have to create your custom class datatype and tell the compiler how to (de)serialize your type (read the MSDN).

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Web;
using System.Net;

public class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(
            "http://www.scripts/report.asp?companyname=Google");

        try
        {
            using (WebResponse response = request.GetResponse())
            {
                Stream recvStream = response.GetResponseStream();
                StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(recvStream , Encoding.UTF8);
                XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(sr);

                // Do the stuff mentioned in the MSDN article here
                // ...
            }
        }
        catch (WebException e)
        {
            using (WebResponse response = e.Response)
            {
                HttpWebResponse httpResponse = (HttpWebResponse) response;
                Console.WriteLine("Error code: {0}", httpResponse.StatusCode);
            }
        }
    }
}