I am sure this must have been answered before but I cannot find a solution, so I figure I am likely misunderstanding other people’s solutions or trying to do something daft, but here we go.
I am writing an add-in for Outlook 2010 in C# where a user can click a button in the ribbon and submit the email contents to a web site. When they click the button the website should open in the default browser, thus allowing them to review what has just been submitted and interact with it on the website. I am able to do this using query strings in the URL using:
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("http://www.test.com?something=value");
but the limit on the amount of data that can be submitted and the messy URLs are preventing me from following through with this approach. I would like to use an HTTP POST for this as it is obviously more suitable. However, the methods I have found for doing this do not seem to open the page up in the browser after submitting the post data:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/debx8sh9.aspx
to summarise; the user needs to be able to click the button in the Outlook ribbon, have the web browser open and display the contents of the email which have been submitted via POST.
EDIT:
Right, I found a way to do it, its pretty fugly but it works! Simply create a temporary .html file (that is then launched as above) containing a form with hidden fields for all the data, and have it submitted on page load with JavaScript.
I don’t really like this solution as it relies on JavaScript (I have a <noscript> submit button just in case) and seems like a bit of a bodge, so I am still really hoping someone on here will come up with something better.
I’m not sure I would have constructed the solution that way. Instead, I would post all the data to a web service (using HttpWebRequest, as @Loci described, or just importing the service using Visual Studio), which would store the data in a database (perhaps with a pending status). Then direct the user (using your Process.Start approach) to a page that would display the pending help ticket, which would allow them to either approve or discard the ticket.
It sounds like a bit more work, but it should clean up the architecture of what you are trying to do. Plus you have the added benefit of not worrying about how to trigger a form post from the client side.
Edit:
A plain ASMX web service should at least get you started. You can right-click on your project and select Add Service Reference to generate the proxy code for calling the service.