Question

I’m trying to perform a programmatic HTTP POST in an ASP.NET MVC 3 application. The aim is to mimic a form submission.

I’m using the following code (modified slightly for confidentiality):

string input = "foo=bar";
byte[] data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(input);

var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://my.domain.com/endpoint");

request.ContentLength = data.Length;
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
request.Method = "POST";

using ( var stream = request.GetRequestStream() ) {
    stream.Write(request);
    stream.Close();
}

var response = request.GetResponse();

// get the response data, do backflips, save the world

The problem is, I’m getting an error during the .GetRequestStream() call, saying that I couldn’t connect to the URL resource.

However, if I plug in the exact same code in a console application, I can connect just fine. A colleague also managed to connect using the same code in a WCF service application.

This is driving me nuts. Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

This sounds like a security issue to me.

To fix try the following:

• Fiddle with the security context your asp.net is running as.
• Ensure that the firewall is set up correctly – try disable it for a quick check.
• Drop back to using the ASP.net dev server to test with [;)]

If this doesnt work then can you please add more info e.g. Fiddler logs, stack trace.