How to check if a file exits on an webserver by its URL?

Question

Hi,

in our application we have some kind of online help. It works really simple: If the user clicks on the help button a URL is build depending on the current language and help context (e.g. "http://example.com/help/" + [LANG_ID] + "[HELP_CONTEXT]) and called within the browser.

So my question is: How can i check if a file exists on the web server without loading the complete file content?

Thanks for your Help!

Update: Thanks for your help. My question has been answered. Now we have proxy authentication problems an cannot send the HTTP request ;)

Answer 1

Send a HEAD request for the URL (instead of a GET). The server will return a 404 if it doesn't exist.

Answer 2

EDIT: Apparently a good method to do this would be a HEAD request.

You could also create a server-side application that stores the name of every available web page on the server. Your client application could then query this application and respond a little bit quicker than a full page request, and without throwing a 404 error every time the file doesn't exist.

Answer 3

You can use .NET to do a HEAD request and then look at the status of the response.

Your code would look something like this (adapted from The Lowly HTTP HEAD Request):

// create the request
HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest;

// instruct the server to return headers only
request.Method = "HEAD";

// make the connection
HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse;

// get the status code
HttpStatusCode status = response.StatusCode;

Here's a list detailing the status codes that can be returned by the StatusCode enumerator.

Answer 4

Can we assume that you are running your web application on the same web server as you are retrieving your help pages from? If yes, then you can use the Server.MapPath method to find a path to the file on the server combined with the File.Exists method from the System.IO namespace to confirm that the file exists.

Answer 5

If you want to check the status of a document on the server:

function fetchStatus(address) {
 var client = new XMLHttpRequest();
 client.onreadystatechange = function() {
  // in case of network errors this might not give reliable results
  if(this.readyState == 4)
   returnStatus(this.status);
 }
 client.open("HEAD", address);
 client.send();
}

Thank you.

Answer 6

Take a look at the HttpWebResponse class. You could do something like this:

string url = "http://example.com/help/" + LANG_ID + HELP_CONTEXT;
WebRequest request=WebRequest.Create(URL);
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
if (response.StatusDescription=="OK") 
{
   // worked
}