Simple application for reading WWW secured ASP page

Since you haven't shown any code I'll assume you are using WebClient to access the remote site. In which case you need to use the Credentials property to supply the proper authentication credentials

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webclient.credentials.aspx[^]

I'm using WebClient to retreive page.

The page has session based authentication mechanism.

If the authentication is session based - using redirects etc., you need to first post to the authentication form, get the authentication cookie and then post/get to the data page that you want to retrieve WITH the authentication cookie in your request.

This post would probably work:
http://couldbedone.blogspot.com/2007/08/webclient-handling-cookies.html[^]

Well I have partially did it. I wrote LogIn mechanism for ASP pages.
The code is below:

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {

                textBox.Clear();

                HttpWebRequest webRequest = WebRequest.Create(loginURL.Text) as HttpWebRequest;
                StreamReader responseReader = new StreamReader(
                      webRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()
                   );
                string responseData = responseReader.ReadToEnd();
                responseReader.Close();

                string viewState = ExtractViewState(responseData);
                string postData =
                      String.Format(
                         paramBox.Text,
                         viewState, userName.Text, userPasswd.Text
                      );

                CookieContainer cookies = new CookieContainer();

                webRequest = WebRequest.Create(loginURL.Text) as HttpWebRequest;
                webRequest.Method = "POST";
                webRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
                webRequest.CookieContainer = cookies;

                StreamWriter requestWriter = new StreamWriter(webRequest.GetRequestStream());
                requestWriter.Write(postData);
                requestWriter.Close();

                webRequest.GetResponse().Close();

                webRequest = WebRequest.Create(secretURL.Text) as HttpWebRequest;
                webRequest.CookieContainer = cookies;
                responseReader = new StreamReader(webRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream());

                responseData = responseReader.ReadToEnd();
                responseReader.Close();

                
                textBox.Text = responseData;
            

        }


private string ExtractViewState(string s)
{
    string viewStateNameDelimiter = "__VIEWSTATE";
    string valueDelimiter = "value=\"";
    int viewStateNamePosition = s.IndexOf(viewStateNameDelimiter);
    int viewStateValuePosition = s.IndexOf(
          valueDelimiter, viewStateNamePosition
       );
    int viewStateStartPosition = viewStateValuePosition +
                                 valueDelimiter.Length;
    int viewStateEndPosition = s.IndexOf("\"", viewStateStartPosition);
    return HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode(
             s.Substring(
                viewStateStartPosition,
                viewStateEndPosition - viewStateStartPosition
             )
          );
}

The code works well. It's written based on examples from many posts & forums.

When I'm skipping __VIEWSTATE param and instead of this I'm putting login form data for PHP based webpages, I can connect to them too.

But I have another problem.
I thought that the site, I'm trying to connect and grab some data from is an ASP page. I was wrong :laugh: The page is based on JAVA servlets.
I've stucked again and I don't know how can I connect to this kind of page.

I'd like to know what have I to change in my code, to connect to the servlet based webpage?

Oh. I've almost forgot. I've checked webpage, I'm trying to connect, with FIDDLER atnd I noticed, that cookie contains JSESSIONID string only.