Question

Trying to figure out a way where I can pass some data/fields from a web page back into my application. This needs to works on Windows/Linux/Mac so I can’t use a DLL or ActiveX. Any ideas?

Here’s the flow:
1. Application gathers some data and then sends it to a web page using POST that is either imbedded in the app or pops up a new IE window.
2. The web page does some services and then needs to relay the results back to the application.

The only way to do this that I can think of is writing the results locally from the page in a cookie or something like that and have the application monitor for a specific file in that folder.

Alternatively, make a web service that the application hits after passing control to the page and when the page is done the web service will return the data. This sounds like it might have some performance drawbacks.

Can anyone suggest any better solutions for this?

Thanks

Answer 1

My suggestion:

Break the processing logic out of the Web Page into a seperate assembly. You can then create a Web Service that handles all of the processing without needing to pass control over to a page.

Your application can then call the Web Service directly and then serialize the results and work with the data quite easily.

Update

Since the page is supplied by a third party, you obviously can’t break anything out. The next best thing would be to handle the entire web request internal to your application (rather than popping a new Window).

With this method, you can get the raw HTTP response (and page markup) and work with it directly. You can then parse the Response stream and gather the required data from it.