WhoIS Class for MFC

Download demo project - 44 Kb

This is a simple MFC class for Internet-based WhoIs processing. WhoIs is an internet function to determine information about specific IP addresses and domain names. A number of companies, such as NetworkSolutions and Internic, keep WHOIS databases online at all times. While many freeware applications exist to display this data, there is little information or code available that actually does it.

Many applications need access to this information, and this class provides a simple way to query these databases. The code to use this class to access this information would look like the following:

// Create class instance
CWhoIsClass whoIs;

// Set address to be queried
CString szAddress = "Microsoft.com";

// Call actual function
CString szResult = whoIs.WhoIs(szAddress);

There are only two public functions for the class:

CString WhoIs(LPCSTR szAddress);
void SetWhoIsServer(LPCSTR szServerName);

The first is used to obtain the WhoIs information. The data is returned as a string that is typically a few hundred characters.

The second is used to change WhoIs servers. The program defaults to the whois.internic.net server. You can change it to whatever whois server best fits your needs. The Internic and Network Solutions servers host mostly US sites. Other servers exist to handle military address and international addresses. You should probably expect to query two or more servers to obtain the best information.

When querying a whois server, you can request either domain name information (eg. microsoft.com) or IP address information (eg. 216.98.67.204). For example, the following would be valid address queries:

whois("microsoft.com")
whois("codedeveloper.com")

but

whois("www.microsoft.com")

would be an invalid query request.

Most whois servers appear to accept the domain portion (minus the "www." part) and return valid information. The query syntax for IP address requests varies by whois server The whois.internic.net server accepts pure IP address queries. The whois.networksolutions.com server however requires that the word "host" preceed the IP portion. If you use the network solutions whois server, which sometimes returns more complete information, your queries would have to take the following form:

whois(host 216.98.67.204)

If the "host" part is missing, no data will be returned with using the whois.networksolutions.com server.

Using the code in your project also requires you include the source and header files for the CWhoIsClass. This would usually look like this:

#include "WhoIsClass.h"
#include "WhoIsClass.cpp"

The code was compiled with VC++ 6.0, but should work with earlier versions as well.  It uses MFC sockets for processing, and therefore requires a AfxSocketInit() call prior to class use. It assumes a connection to the Internet already exists.

That's it. Not very complicated, but it solved my problem. Perhaps it will help others as well.