Question

So I’ve been trying to fetch a web page that uses authentication to a string and save it to a file. It should be pretty basic so I hope someone can see my errors. I’m very new to C# so treat me thereafter 🙂

This code functions to some extend, but the file I get is the html for the login screen and not the page that its shown for users that is logged in. What is it I’m doing wrong?

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace fetchingweb
{
    class WebAutheticator
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string htmlHer = GetWeb();
            StreamWriter file = new
                StreamWriter("C:\\Users\\user\\Documents\\atextfile.txt");
            file.Write(htmlHer);
            file.Close();
        } //main end

        private static string GetWeb()
        {
            WebClient wc = new WebClient();
            wc.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("user", "pass");
            string url = "http://someurl.com/index.php";
            try
            {
                using (Stream stream = wc.OpenRead(new Uri(url)))
                {
                    using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream))
                    {
                        return reader.ReadToEnd();
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (WebException e)
            {
                return "failure!";
            }
        } //getweb end
    } //class end
} //namespace end

Answer 1

You are using NetworkCredential to login at the webapp, but the webapp is using some kind of forms authentication.
As long as the webapp is not configured to use network credentials this will not work.

Since this is a php application I guess it uses plain forms auth and that you will need to post username/password to the login page before continuing.