Question

I’m using the following code to simulate a page post. (I’m subclassing WebClient so that I can extend some protected members.)

public class AuthorizeNetClient : WebClient
{
    public string PostData(string url, FormCollection formData)
    {
        byte[] response = UploadValues(url, formData);
        return Encoding.ASCII.GetString(response);
    }
}

This code is straight forward, but I have two issues:

1. I know I will get an exception if there’s an error, but I think results with non-success HTTP status codes are still possible. Is there a way to get those status codes without needing to parse the results?

2. Also, I’m going to need to add a bunch of headers to make this seem like a real page post. Any good examples of doing this and the type of headers I need to add?

Answer 1

The only request header needed for a FORM POST is ‘content-type: x-www-form-urlencoded’.

Also, WebClient will throw an exception for all HTTP status codes != 2xx (ie. success) so you should be ok here. You just need to catch the WebException and see if the e.Status == WebExceptionStatus.ProtocolError. If that is the case, you can get the HttpWebResponse object from the Exception object ( e.Response ) and do whatever you want with it.