C# login to website using HTTPWebRequest

Question

I am trying to login to this website: https://lms.nust.edu.pk/portal/login/index.php Here's my code:

   const string uri = "https://lms.nust.edu.pk/portal/login/index.php";
    HttpWebRequest wr = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
    wr.KeepAlive = true;
    wr.Method = "POST";
    wr.AllowAutoRedirect = false;
    wr.Proxy = p;
    wr.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8";
    wr.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
    wr.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.111 Safari/537.36";
    string pdata = "username=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD";
    byte[] data = UTF8Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(pdata);
    wr.ContentLength = data.Length;
    CookieContainer cookie = new CookieContainer();
    wr.CookieContainer = cookie;
    using (Stream poststream = wr.GetRequestStream())
    {
        poststream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
    }
    HttpWebResponse wp = (HttpWebResponse)wr.GetResponse();
    wr.CookieContainer.Add(wp.Cookies);

Its not going past the login page. Here's what I know is happening. There are no cookies in the wp.Cookies. I debugged the code, which told me that even though I have the uri specified and have set AllowAutoRedirect=false, its not going to that uri and another url. I don't know why or how. Can somebody help me?

Maybe this will help http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4158448/c-sharp-webrequest-using-cookies — TGH, Oct 31 '14 at 01:01

Aydin · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-31T01:22:11.270

This should solve your problem, or point you in the right direction at least, you may also want to download Fiddler to help debug HttpRequests...

string param = "username=MyUserName&password=123456";
string url = "https://lms.nust.edu.pk/portal/login/index.php";
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
request.Method = "POST";
request.ContentLength = param.Length;
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
request.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();

using (Stream stream = request.GetRequestStream())
{
    byte[] paramAsBytes = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(param);
    stream.Write(paramAsBytes, 0, paramAsBytes.Count());
}

using (HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
{
    foreach (var cookie in response.Cookies)
    {
        var properties = cookie.GetType()
                               .GetProperties()
                               .Select(p => new 
                               { 
                                   Name = p.Name, 
                                   Value = p.GetValue(cookie) 
                               });

        foreach (var property in properties)
        {
            Console.WriteLine ("{0}: {1}", property.Name, property.Value);
        }
    }
}

And the response I got was...

Comment: 
CommentUri: 
HttpOnly: False
Discard: False
Domain: lms.nust.edu.pk
Expired: False
Expires: 01/01/0001 00:00:00
Name: MoodleSession
Path: /
Port: 
Secure: False
TimeStamp: 31/10/2014 00:13:58
Value: f6ich1aa2udb3o24dtnluomtd3
Version: 0

So cookies are definitely being returned as well...

C# login to website using HTTPWebRequest

1 Answers1