Question

Need some advice. I’ve setup the following HttpWebRequest, which goes over to another server and retrieves data from there in htnl format – but I can change this to another structre.

What I would like to do is databind the data from there and present it nicely using repeaters and a list control in my website.

I’ve got most of code here below. The question I need to ask is, can I databind my responseData object the way I’ve got it setup. Secondly, I can configure the page at the other end to produce output in most formats. If I have customername,contact,telephone,email, how shall I present structure wise so I can use it as a databind object?

Hope the question makes sense. Thanks as always

    string url = "https://myaddress/customerlist.php";

    // creates the post data for the POST request
    string postData = "ID=" + username + "&Token=" + token;

    // create the POST request
    HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
    webRequest.Method = "POST";
    webRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
    webRequest.ContentLength = postData.Length;

    // POST the data
    using (StreamWriter requestWriter2 = new StreamWriter(webRequest.GetRequestStream()))
    {
        requestWriter2.Write(postData);
    }

    //  This actually does the request and gets the response back
    HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();

    string responseData = string.Empty;

    using (StreamReader responseReader = new StreamReader(webRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()))
    {
        // dumps the HTML from the response into a string variable
        responseData = responseReader.ReadToEnd();
    }

    ReportRepeater.DataSource = responseData;
    ReportRepeater.DataBind();

Answer 1

you should transform responseData in a list of custom object in order to bind it to the repeater

IList<Contact> contacts = ParseResponse(responseData);

ReportRepeater.DataSource = contacts;
ReportRepeater.DataBind();

Where ParseResponse is a custom method like this:

IList<Contact> ParseResponse(string response)
{
   var rtn = new List<Contact>();

   //some loop to create contacts
   //rtn.Add(newContact);

   return rtn;
}

A good explanation to how use repeater:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163780.aspx