list the files and folder on a remote web sever (http).

Question

Hi, i would like to list files on remote sever (HTTP) Please advice me on possible options for a console application.

Answer 1

If your http serer use webdav it is simple to do. Here some example code: Beware that you have to include a reference in your project to MSXML2 Com object

public static void PrintDirectoryContents(string url, bool deep) {
    var xmlHttp_ = new XMLHTTP();

    // Build the query.
    string requestString = 
        "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" ?>" +
        "<a:propfind xmlns:a=\"DAV:\">" +
        "<a:prop>" +
        "<a:displayname/>" +
        "<a:iscollection/>" +
        "<a:getlastmodified/>" +
        "</a:prop>" +
            "</a:propfind>";

        // Open a connection to the server.
        xmlHttp_.open("PROPFIND", url, false, "youruser", "yourpassword");

        // Send the request.
        xmlHttp_.setRequestHeader("PROPFIND", requestString);
        xmlHttp_.send(null);

        // Get the response.
        string folderList = xmlHttp_.responseText;

        // Parse the folder list.
     XmlDocument XmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
        var xml = folderList;
        XmlDoc.LoadXml(xml);

        //HERE you can read the xmldocument for the 
        //properties of the files you need  
}

Answer 2

You can use the WebClient class to call your server, read the file/directory lists and navigate through the directories recursively.

Here is the basic use of WebClient:

WebClient client = new WebClient ();
Stream data = client.OpenRead ("http://example.com");
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(data);
string s = reader.ReadToEnd ();

// At this point, the variable s contains the returned webpage

Another option, which may be more suitable, it to use the HTML Agility Pack - you can use the WebHtml object to retrieve HTML directly from the web and then query it using XPath syntax.