Question

I’m trying to create/modify dotclear blogs.

For most of the options, I use XmlRpc API (DotClear.MetaWeblog). But I didn’t find any way to handle categories.

So I start to look at the Http packet and try to do “the same as the browser”.

1. Here is the method I use to “Http POST”

   protected HttpStatusCode HttpPost(Uri url_, string data_, bool allowAutoRedirect_)
   {
       HttpWebRequest Request;
       HttpWebResponse Response = null;
       Stream ResponseStream = null;
       Request = (System.Net.HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url_);
       Request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)";
       Request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
       Request.AllowAutoRedirect = allowAutoRedirect_;
       // Add the network credentials to the request.
       Request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(Username, Password);
   
       string authInfo = Username + ":" + Password;
       authInfo = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.Default.GetBytes(authInfo));
       Request.Headers["Authorization"] = "Basic " + authInfo; 
   
       Request.Method = "POST";
       Request.CookieContainer = Cookies;
       if(ConnectionCookie!=null)
           Request.CookieContainer.Add(url_, ConnectionCookie);
       if (dcAdminCookie != null)
           Request.CookieContainer.Add(url_, dcAdminCookie);
       Request.PreAuthenticate = true;
   
       ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
       string postData = data_;
       byte[] data = encoding.GetBytes(postData); //Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data_);  //encoding.GetBytes(postData);
       Request.ContentLength = data.Length;
       Request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
       Stream newStream = Request.GetRequestStream();
       // Send the data.
       newStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
       newStream.Close();
   
       try
       {
           // get the response from the server.
           Response = (HttpWebResponse)Request.GetResponse();
           if (!allowAutoRedirect_)
           {
               foreach (Cookie c in Response.Cookies)
               {
                   if (c.Name == "dcxd")
                       ConnectionCookie = c;
                   if (c.Name == "dc_admin")
                       dcAdminCookie = c;
   
               }
   
               Cookies.Add(Response.Cookies);
           }
           // Get the response stream.
           ResponseStream = Response.GetResponseStream();
           // Pipes the stream to a higher level stream reader with the required encoding format. 
           StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(ResponseStream, Encoding.UTF8);
           string result = readStream.ReadToEnd();
   
           if (Request.RequestUri == Response.ResponseUri)
           {
               _log.InfoFormat("{0} ==> {1}({2})", Request.RequestUri, Response.StatusCode, Response.StatusDescription);
           }
           else
           {
               _log.WarnFormat("RequestUri:{0}\r\nResponseUri:{1}\r\nstatus code:{2} Status descr:{3}", Request.RequestUri, Response.ResponseUri, Response.StatusCode, Response.StatusDescription);
           }
       }
       catch (WebException wex)
       {
           Response = wex.Response as HttpWebResponse;
   
           if (Response != null)
           {
               _log.ErrorFormat("{0} ==> {1}({2})", Request.RequestUri, Response.StatusCode, Response.StatusDescription);
           }
   
           Request.Abort();
       }
       finally
       {
           if (Response != null)
           { 
               // Releases the resources of the response.
               Response.Close();
           }
   
       }
       if(Response !=null)
           return Response.StatusCode;
   
       return HttpStatusCode.Ambiguous;
   }
   

2. So the first thing to do is to Authenticate as admin. Here is the code:

   protected bool HttpAuthenticate()
   {
       Uri u = new Uri(this.Url);
       Uri url = new Uri(string.Format("{0}/admin/auth.php", u.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Authority)));
       string data = string.Format("user_id={0}&user_pwd={1}&user_remember=1", Username, Password);
       var ret = HttpPost(url,data,false);
       return (ret == HttpStatusCode.OK || ret==HttpStatusCode.Found);
   }
   

3. Now that I’m authenticated, I need to get a xd_chek info (that I can find on the page so basically it’s a GET on /admin/category.php + Regex(dotclear[.]nonce = '(.*)'))

4. So I’m authenticated and have the xd_check info. The last thing to do seems to post the next category. But of course it does not work at all… Here is the code:

   string postData = string.Format("cat_title={0}&new_cat_parent={1}&xd_check={2}", category_, 0, xdCheck);
   HttpPost(url, postData, true);
   

Where am I going wrong?

Answer 1

Finaly I found the solution.

It seems that the cookies where lost between anthentication and use of the pages.

So I decide to not use de CookiesContainer of the framework but simply keep the cookies in a string and pass them at every request.

And it works great !

code exemple:

private string _cookieAsString = string.Empty;

    protected string CookieAsString
    {
        get { return _cookieAsString; }
        set
        {
            if (value != null)
            {
                if (!_cookieAsString.Contains(value))
                {
                    if (_cookieAsString.Length == 0)
                        _cookieAsString = value;
                    else
                        _cookieAsString += string.Format(";{0}", value);
                }
            }
        }
    }

And in the HttpWebRequest, I set it this way:

...
Request.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.Cookie, CookieAsString);
...

And keep the cookies in the httpWebRequest like this:

...
CookieAsString = Response.Headers[HttpResponseHeader.SetCookie];
...