How to add Category in DotClear blog with HttpWebRequest or MetaWeblog API

Question

I'm trying to create/modify dotclear blogs.

For most of the options, i use XmlRpc API (DotClear.MetaWeblog). But didn't find any way to handle categories.

So I start to look at the Http packet and try to do "the same as the browser".

1. Here si the method I use to "Http POST"

       protected HttpStatusCode HttpPost(Uri url_, string data_, bool allowAutoRedirect_)
       {
       HttpWebRequest Request;
       HttpWebResponse Response = null;
       Stream ResponseStream = null;
       Request = (System.Net.HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url_);
       Request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)";
       Request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
       Request.AllowAutoRedirect = allowAutoRedirect_;
       // Add the network credentials to the request.
       Request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(Username, Password);
   
   
   string authInfo = Username + ":" + Password;
   authInfo = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.Default.GetBytes(authInfo));
   Request.Headers["Authorization"] = "Basic " + authInfo; 
   
   
   Request.Method = "POST";
   Request.CookieContainer = Cookies;
   if(ConnectionCookie!=null)
       Request.CookieContainer.Add(url_, ConnectionCookie);
   if (dcAdminCookie != null)
       Request.CookieContainer.Add(url_, dcAdminCookie);
   Request.PreAuthenticate = true;
   
   
   ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
   string postData = data_;
   byte[] data = encoding.GetBytes(postData); //Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data_);  //encoding.GetBytes(postData);
   Request.ContentLength = data.Length;
   Request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
   Stream newStream = Request.GetRequestStream();
   // Send the data.
   newStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
   newStream.Close();
   
   
   try
   {
       // get the response from the server.
       Response = (HttpWebResponse)Request.GetResponse();
       if (!allowAutoRedirect_)
       {
           foreach (Cookie c in Response.Cookies)
           {
               if (c.Name == "dcxd")
                   ConnectionCookie = c;
               if (c.Name == "dc_admin")
                   dcAdminCookie = c;
   
   
           }
   
   
           Cookies.Add(Response.Cookies);
       }
       // Get the response stream.
       ResponseStream = Response.GetResponseStream();
       // Pipes the stream to a higher level stream reader with the required encoding format. 
       StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(ResponseStream, Encoding.UTF8);
       string result = readStream.ReadToEnd();
   
   
       if (Request.RequestUri == Response.ResponseUri)
       {
           _log.InfoFormat("{0} ==> {1}({2})", Request.RequestUri, Response.StatusCode, Response.StatusDescription);
       }
       else
       {
           _log.WarnFormat("RequestUri:{0}\r\nResponseUri:{1}\r\nstatus code:{2} Status descr:{3}", Request.RequestUri, Response.ResponseUri, Response.StatusCode, Response.StatusDescription);
       }
   }
   catch (WebException wex)
   {
       Response = wex.Response as HttpWebResponse;
   
   
       if (Response != null)
       {
           _log.ErrorFormat("{0} ==> {1}({2})", Request.RequestUri, Response.StatusCode, Response.StatusDescription);
       }
   
   
       Request.Abort();
   }
   finally
   {
       if (Response != null)
       { 
           // Releases the resources of the response.
           Response.Close();
       }
   
   
   }
   if(Response !=null)
       return Response.StatusCode;
   
   
   return HttpStatusCode.Ambiguous;
   
   
   }
   

2. So the first thing to do is to Authenticate as admin. Here is the code:

   protected bool HttpAuthenticate() { Uri u = new Uri(this.Url); Uri url = new Uri(string.Format("{0}/admin/auth.php", u.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Authority))); string data = string.Format("user_id={0}&user_pwd={1}&user_remember=1", Username, Password); var ret = HttpPost(url,data,false); return (ret == HttpStatusCode.OK || ret==HttpStatusCode.Found); }

3.Now that I'm authenticate, i need to get a xd_chek info (that i can find on the page so basically it's a GET on /admin/category.php + Regex("dotclear[.]nonce = '(.*)'"))

4.so I'm authenticate and have the xd_check info. The last thing to do seems to post the next category. But of course it does not work at all... here is the code:

string postData = string.Format("cat_title={0}&new_cat_parent={1}&xd_check={2}", category_, 0, xdCheck);
HttpPost(url, postData, true);

If anyone can help me and explain were is it wrong ?

thanks in advance.

Answer 1

What do you mean by "doesnt work"? What is happening from the server side? What HTTP response did you get back?

Answer 2

Finaly I found the solution.

It seems that the cookies where lost between anthentication and use of the pages.

So I decide to not use de CookiesContainer of the framework but simply keep the cookies in a string and pass them at every request.

And it works great !

code exemple:

private string _cookieAsString = string.Empty;

    protected string CookieAsString
    {
        get { return _cookieAsString; }
        set
        {
            if (value != null)
            {
                if (!_cookieAsString.Contains(value))
                {
                    if (_cookieAsString.Length == 0)
                        _cookieAsString = value;
                    else
                        _cookieAsString += string.Format(";{0}", value);
                }
            }
        }
    }

And in the HttpWebRequest, I set it this way:

...
Request.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.Cookie, CookieAsString);
...

And keep the cookies in the httpWebRequest like this:

...
CookieAsString = Response.Headers[HttpResponseHeader.SetCookie];
...