Question

I am doing an e-commerce solution in ASP.NET which uses PayPal’s Website Payments Standard service. Together with that I use a service they offer (Payment Data Transfer) that sends you back order information after a user has completed a payment. The final thing I need to do is to parse the POST request from them and persist the info in it. The HTTP request’s content is in this form :

SUCCESS
first_name=Jane+Doe
last_name=Smith
payment_status=Completed
payer_email=janedoesmith%40hotmail.com
payment_gross=3.99
mc_currency=USD
custom=For+the+purchase+of+the+rare+book+Green+Eggs+%26+Ham

Basically I want to parse this information and do something meaningful, like send it through e-mail or save it in DB. My question is what is the right approach to do parsing raw HTTP data in ASP.NET, not how the parsing itself is done.

Answer 1

Something like this placed in your onload event.

if (Request.RequestType == 'POST') {     using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(Request.InputStream))     {         if (sr.ReadLine() == 'SUCCESS')         {             /* Do your parsing here */         }     } } 

Mind you that they might want some special sort of response to (ie; not your full webpage), so you might do something like this after you’re done parsing.

Response.Clear(); Response.ContentType = 'text/plain'; Response.Write('Thanks!'); Response.End(); 

Update: this should be done in a Generic Handler (.ashx) file in order to avoid a great deal of overhead from the page model. Check out this article for more information about .ashx files