Question

I am writing a .dll that will execute Gets and Posts.
In order to do so, i created this class:

public class BDCWebRequests
{
    // private attributes
    private static CookieContainer m_CookieJar;
    private static HttpWebRequest  m_HttpWebRequest;
    private static string          m_defaultUserAgent      = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.107 Safari/535.1";
    private static string          m_defaultContentType    = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

    // Public Properties
    public HttpWebRequest InternalWebRequest
    {
        get { return m_HttpWebRequest; }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Class Constructor
    /// </summary>
    public BDCWebRequests()
    {
        m_CookieJar = new CookieContainer();
    }

   // Methods Come Here...
}

What i am trying to achieve is a way for the user of this lib to configure the request properly using the “InternalWebRequest” property.

The usage would be something like this:

BDCWebRequests myInstance = new BDCWebRequests();
myInstance.InternalWebRequest.Referer = "refererUrl";
myInstance.AllowAutoRedirect          = true;
myInstance.Host                       = "hostUrl";

After doing so, there are Posts and Get Methods ( Here is the GET as an Example )

 public string Get(string url)
    {
        try
        {
            // Creating instance of HttpWebRequest based on URL received
            m_HttpWebRequest = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create (url);

            m_HttpWebRequest.Method                        = "GET";
            m_HttpWebRequest.UserAgent                     = m_defaultUserAgent;

            // Execute web request and wait for response
            using (HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse) m_HttpWebRequest.GetResponse())
            {
              return new StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd();
            }

        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            LogWriter.Error(ex);
        }

        return String.Empty;
    } 

Usage:

myInstance.Get("UrlForTheRequest");

Main Issue:
I am having problem when a user Executes a GET or a POST,and after this, he tries to change any attribute of the internal instance of HttpWebRequest using the public property.

If a user Calls a GET for example,and after that he tries to :

myInstance.InternalWebRequest.Host = "", for example, it throws an error:
"this property cannot be set after writing has started"

Any idea of how to Logically implement it so that a user can :

1 – Configure the request anywhere, anytime without getting me this error
2 – Execute Gets and Posts using the previously Configured Request ?

Sorry for that Long Question, thanks in advance for the patience.
Please, do not TL:DR 🙂

Answer 1

Simple: the moment you’ve sent the request, read all the required data from the response, and then create a new request, and copy all relevant parameters from old request to it.