Question

Trying to setup a personal image upload/downloader webpage. I’ve viewed the msdn article on the function, and it runs fine but I cant figure out where it saves the file to.

var request = new WebClient();
request.DownloadFile("https://someabosolute/image/path/andfilename.png", "file.png");

Any Ideas?

@ escape or \ resolve an invalid character issue once you change filename.png to C:\tmp\filename.png. However using jsut a file name causes to errors everything runs but I cannot find the file. Even checked Windows security and application logs and there nothing relating to the time frame.

SO where should the file be saved to in a web application when you only specify a filename as the second parameter in the DownloadFile() method of system.net.webclient.

Answer 1

According to the example in the Microsoft Documentation, the file will be downloaded to Application.StartupPath. If only a filename is provided, it will be saved in the same path as where your executable is.

Keep in mind that for some applications (e.g. ASP.NET web applications) there may be a permission issue saving the file in the same folder as the executable.

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

namespace ConsoleApplication2
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      string remoteUri = "put your url here";
      string fileName = "image.php_.jpeg", myStringWebResource = null;
      // Create a new WebClient instance.
      WebClient myWebClient = new WebClient();
      // Concatenate the domain with the Web resource filename.
      myStringWebResource = remoteUri + fileName;
      Console.WriteLine("Downloading File \"{0}\" from \"{1}\" .......\n\n", fileName, myStringWebResource);
      // Download the Web resource and save it into the current filesystem folder.
      myWebClient.DownloadFile(myStringWebResource, @"c:\tmp\" + fileName);
      Console.WriteLine("Successfully Downloaded File \"{0}\" from \"{1}\"", fileName, myStringWebResource);
    }
}

}