IE automation question

[Rajasekharan Vengalil]

Is there any particular reason why you wish to automate IE to achieve this instead of the HTTP classes from the base class library?

-- gleat http://blogorama.nerdworks.in[^] --

[swheat]

Hi Pete I would love to use ftp it would solve so many problems. The question I asked really has nothing to do with ftp. Why is the code you posted relevant? Thanks

[swheat]

Thanks for your suggestion - I will use any method that works. Simpler = better. I found some examples of using a stream object - I do not understand how to: a) convert the stream to a mshtml document b) post the document back to the server c) handle the subsequent file download.

[Rajasekharan Vengalil]

How does the server return the Excel document in response to the POST? Does it send it back as a file download, i.e., does the browser show up the file download dialog? Or does it show a link that you can click?

-- gleat http://blogorama.nerdworks.in[^] --

[swheat]

The browser shows the download dialog (save file as...)

[Pete OHanlon]

If you don't want to use FTP, then ignore the code; but I put it there to show you how easy it is to use FTP, and to question why you would want to do something other than use FTP to do a task which FTP was designed for. I really can't see why you would want to do anything else here.

Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.

[swheat]

Pete, I appreciate the fact that you have taken the time to respond to my question. If you take a brief moment to read the post you responded to you would note that I am trying to download files from the website of Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. While they are a great bunch of folks, I highly doubt that they would put up an ftp server for no other reason than to resolve my little issue:laugh:. If you feel the code is useful, please post a specific example of how it might be used in the context I described. I am open to resolutions of any kind. I have done a fairly extensive search and no one seems to have a solution.

[Rajasekharan Vengalil]

Here's a sample program that does what you describe. It does a POST to a web page and then gets a file in response which it saves to the local disk. Hope this helps!

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

namespace PostDownload
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
try
{
string url = "http://nerdworks.in/webstuff/getfui.aspx";
string postdata = "fn=logo.gif&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fintl%2Fen_ALL%2Fimages%2Flogo.gif";

            //
            // create a web request for our page
            //
            WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
            request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
            request.Method = "POST";
            ((HttpWebRequest)request).Referer = url;

            //
            // write the post data
            //
            using (Stream stream = request.GetRequestStream())
            {
                stream.Write(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(postdata), 0, Encoding.UTF8.GetByteCount(postdata));
                stream.Flush();
            }

            //
            // get the response
            //
            WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();

            using (FileStream dest = new FileStream(GetFilename(response), FileMode.Create))
            {
                using (Stream src = response.GetResponseStream())
                    CopyStream(src, dest);
            }
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("ERROR: {0}", ex.ToString());
        }
    }

    private static string GetFilename(WebResponse response)
    {
        //
        // try and get a file name from Content-Disposition
        //
        string filename = response.Headers\["Content-Disposition"\];
        if (filename != null)
        {
            string\[\] tokens = filename.Split(';');
            if (tokens.Length == 2)
            {
                tokens = tokens\[1\].Split('=');
                if (tokens.Length == 2)
                    filename = tokens\[1\];
                else
                    filename = null;
            }
            else
                filename = null;
        }

[swheat]

gleat you are amazing! Thank you very much! I am going to try to make this work. I am sure I will have some questions but I am going to work with this a while first.

[swheat]

Gleat, thanks again for your program. The only thing that is different in the situation I described is that the postdata values are not known when the program is run. You gave me the info I needed to look that up so all is good. For the benefit of any one else who is trying to do this: Download a program called Fiddler from www.fiddler2.com. Open fiddler then use your web browser to click the elements on the page you are trying to automate. Observe the data posted back to the server. The ParseDocument function you write (see code below) will need to create a string that matches the postdata. Here is the code you can run to automate your page. Create a form with a textbox and a button. Paste the code below as the form class. The ParseDocument function is specific for my purpose. I included it to demonstrate the basic foreach loop and id test.

public partial class Form3 : Form
    {
        public Form3()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Form3_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {

        }

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            try
            {
                // Create a web request for the initital query to get post values
                string url = textBox1.Text;
                IHTMLDocument2 doc = new HTMLDocumentClass();
                WebRequest request1 = WebRequest.Create(url);
                WebResponse response1 = request1.GetResponse();
                StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response1.GetResponseStream());
                doc.write(reader.ReadToEnd());
                doc.close();
                response1.Close();
                // Loop through the html document elements to get postdata values
                string postdata = ParseDocument(doc);
                
                //
                // create a web request for our page
                //
                WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
                request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
                request.Method = "POST";
                ((HttpWebRequest)request).Referer = url;

                //
                // write the post data
                //
                
                using (Stream stream = request.GetRequestStream())
                {
                    stream.Write(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(postdata), 0, Encoding.UTF8.GetByteCount(postdata));
                    stream.Flush();