c# - WebRequest HTTP POST with Cookie (port from curl script)

Question

The IBM RTC RESTful api gives an example of a shell script for authenticating with the server:

COOKIES=./cookies.txt

USER=my_user
PASSWORD=my_password
HOST="https://myJazzServer:9092/jazz"

curl -k -c $COOKIES "$HOST/authenticated/identity"

curl -k -L -b $COOKIES -c $COOKIES -d j_username=$USER -d j_password=$PASSWORD "$HOST/authenticated/j_security_check"

This works perfectly, however i need to authenticate with the server using c#.

So far i have the following, but it isn't working (returns the authorization failed page):

    CookieContainer _cookie;

    public string _RTC()
    {
        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://myJazzServer.com:9092/jazz/authenticated/identity");
        if (_cookie == null)
        {
            _cookie = new CookieContainer();
        }
        string a;
        request.CookieContainer = _cookie;
        using (var response = request.GetResponse())
        {
            using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
            {
                a = sr.ReadToEnd();
            }
        }




        byte[] data = (new ASCIIEncoding()).GetBytes("j_username=myUser&j_password=MyPass");

        request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://myJazzServer.com:9092/jazz/authenticated/j_security_check");

        request.Method = "POST";
        request.ContentType = "text/html";
        request.ContentLength = data.Length;
        request.CookieContainer = _cookie;
        Stream reqStream = request.GetRequestStream();
        reqStream.Write(data,0,data.Length);

        string b;

        using (var response = request.GetResponse())
        {
            using (var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
            {
                b = reader.ReadToEnd();
            }
        }
    }

Answer 1

I would suggest you try the following:

public class WebClientEx : WebClient
{
    private CookieContainer _cookieContainer = new CookieContainer();

    protected override WebRequest GetWebRequest(Uri address)
    {
        WebRequest request = base.GetWebRequest(address);
        if (request is HttpWebRequest)
        {
            (request as HttpWebRequest).CookieContainer = _cookieContainer;
        }
        return request;
    }
}

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        using (var client = new WebClientEx())
        {
            var response1 = client.DownloadString("https://myJazzServer.com:9092/jazz/authenticated/identity");

            var data = new NameValueCollection
            {
                { "j_username", "myUser" },
                { "j_password", "MyPass" },
            };
            var response2 = client.UploadValues("https://myJazzServer.com:9092/jazz/authenticated/j_security_check", data);
            Console.WriteLine(Encoding.Default.GetString(response2));
        }
    }
}

Also to simplify debugging you could activate tracing by putting this in your app.config:

<configuration>

  <system.diagnostics>
    <sources>
      <source name="System.Net.Sockets" tracemode="protocolonly">
        <listeners>
          <add name="System.Net.Sockets" type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" initializeData="network.log" />
        </listeners>
      </source>
    </sources>

    <switches>
      <add name="System.Net.Sockets" value="Verbose"/>
    </switches>

    <trace autoflush="true" />
  </system.diagnostics>
</configuration>

This will create a detailed log file of the network activity which might simplify debugging.