I’ve found a few posts about retrieving HTML from an ASPX page, mostly by overriding the render method, using a WebClient, or creating an HttpWebRequest. All these methods return the HTML of the page as it’s loaded, but I was hoping to actually retrieve the HTML after the user has entered information.
The purpose behind this is that I work in IT, and I’m attempting to build a logging library that has an overload that essentially does a “screen-scrape” on the page just as the user encounters an exception, that way I can log the exception, and create an HTML file in a sub-directory of the logging directory that shows the page exactly as the user had it before clicking “submit” or having some other random error, and add an “ID” to the error that’s logged telling whoever is fixing the issue which page to look at.
I hope I’ve provided enough information, because I really have no idea where to start.
Also, We’d like to do this through our own library, because our logging library is included in our common library, and many of our common library functions use our logging class.
Hmmm…
If you want to see what the user sees after they’ve been using the page, you’re most likely going to have to do some fancy client-side scripting.
A naive approach:
When the clicks the submit button, fire a JavaScript event that encodes the DOM and either passes it as a form variable to the server, or executes a separate AJAX request with the encoded data as a parameter. (“Encode” in this case may be as simple as grabbing document.innerHtml, but I haven’t checked.)
This potentially introduces a lot of overhead to every form submission, so I’d keep it out of production code.
I’m not sure why you need the rendered HTML as part of your exception log – I’ve never found it necessary for server-side debugging.