Question

I’m creating an application to do a few different things on a website in the logged in section.

To do this, I must maintain a single continuous Cookie session for all requests I make.

So far I have successfully connected to the website via HttpWebRequest and the response has confirmed this, however I have been unable to reuse the cookie.

I have read all over SO and found topics that indicate how to use a cookie within the same function or class but I require the ability to use the cookie in multiple different functions.

My first thought was to try returning the cookie container from the initial login function and then pass it as a parameter to each subsequent function but I just couldn’t get it going.

Is anyone able to suggest either a better method or a way I can accomplish this?

Answer 1

I eventually came across the solution myself after much reading online. It appears the reason this didn’t work the first time I tried it was due to other settings that I had configured wrong.

So for anyone else that may encounter the same issue, hope this helps:

public const string userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1";
public CookieContainer cookieJar;

private void Login_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    cookieJar = Login();
}

private CookieContainer Login()
{
    string username = txtUsername.Text;
    string password = txtPassword.Text;

    // Create a request using the provied URL. 
    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(loginPageURL);

    // Set the Method property of the request to POST.
    request.Method = "POST";

    // Set the Cookiecontainer
    CookieContainer cookieJar = new CookieContainer();
    request.CookieContainer = cookieJar;

    // Create POST data and convert it to a byte array.
    string postData = "username=" + username + "&password=" + password;
    byte[] byteArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes (postData);

    // Set the ContentType property of the WebRequest.
    request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

    // Set the User Agent
    request.UserAgent = userAgent;

    // Set the ContentLength property of the WebRequest.
    request.ContentLength = byteArray.Length;

    // Get the request stream.
    Stream dataStream = request.GetRequestStream ();

    // Write the data to the request stream.
    dataStream.Write (byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length);

    // Close the Stream object.
    dataStream.Close ();

    // Get the response.
    HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

    // Get the stream containing content returned by the server.
    dataStream = response.GetResponseStream ();

    // Open the stream using a StreamReader for easy access.
    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader (dataStream);

    // Read the content.
    string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd ();

    string cookie = cookieJar.GetCookieHeader(request.RequestUri);

    // Clean up the streams.
    reader.Close();
    dataStream.Close();
    response.Close();

    return cookieJar;
}

private void viewPage(CookieContainer cookieJar, string pageURL)
{ 
    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(pageURL);

    // Set the ContentType property of the WebRequest.
    request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

    // Set the Method property of the request to POST.
    request.Method = "POST";

    // Set the User Agent
    request.UserAgent = userAgent;

    // Put session back into CookieContainer
    request.CookieContainer = cookieJar;

    // Get the request stream.
    Stream dataStream = request.GetRequestStream();

    // Close the Stream object.
    dataStream.Close();

    // Get the response.
    HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

    // Get the stream containing content returned by the server.
    dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();

    // Open the stream using a StreamReader for easy access.
    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(dataStream);

    // Read the content.
    string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd();
}