multiform post data using http thingies

Question

User-1914850765 posted

Strugling to post data to an URL.

The early supposedly accepts 2 things

1) profileName

2) File Data

Tried This But Get Returned :  ERROR:ProfileName Missing.  Tried so Many variants of different things...

Dim WebClient As New System.Net.WebClient

Dim strData As String

        Dim ParamColl As New System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection
        ParamColl.Add("profileName", "fteditorial")

        Dim WebClientResponse As Byte()

        Try
            WebClientResponse = WebClient.UploadValues("http://ftmail.ft.com/interface/list_upload_data.php", "POST",
            MsgBox(System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(WebClientResponse))
        Catch ex As Exception
            MsgBox(ex.Message)
        End Try

Uplaod data example below given to me by client.

POST /interface/list_upload_data.php HTTP/1.1
Host: response.pure360.com
User-Agent: www.xyz.com upload process
Accept: text/plain
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1
Keep-Alive: 3600
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.xyz.com/uploadRequest.jsp
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------
25578952812662351891242608872
Content-Length: 516
-----------------------------25578952812662351891242608872
Content-Dis-data; name="profileName";
myProfile
-----------------------------25578952812662351891242608872
Content-Dis-data; name="123456789"; filename="listData.csv"
Content-Type: text/plain
[e-mail],John Smith,07798564352,Brighton
[e-mail],Sarah Jones,0779646352,London
[e-mail],Bob Samuel,0775354542,Cardiff
-----------------------------25578952812662351891242608872--

Bloody stumped...

Tried various HttpRequest object versions I found using streams...

Help

Answer 1

User863160722 posted

The WebClient has methods to upload a collection of values, and methods to upload files, but it doesn't seem to have any methods to upload a combination of the two.

I managed to work around it by building the request body by hand and using UploadData - the same approach might work for you:

Using client As New WebClient
	client.CachePolicy = new RequestCachePolicy(RequestCacheLevel.NoCacheNoStore)
	
	Dim boundary As String = "---------------------" + DateTime.Now.Ticks.ToString("x", NumberFormatInfo.InvariantInfo)
	client.Headers(HttpRequestHeader.ContentType) = "multipart/form-data; boundary=" + boundary
	
	Dim data As Byte() = BuildPostData("--" + boundary) 'NB: The "--" + is important!
	Dim response As Byte() = client.UploadData("http://ftmail.ft.com/interface/list_upload_data.php", "POST", data)
	
	MsgBox(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(response))
End Using

...

Function BuildPostData(ByVal boundary As String) As Byte()
	Using ms As New MemoryStream()
		Using writer As New StreamWriter(ms, Encoding.UTF8)
			'Write profileName:
			writer.WriteLine(boundary)
			writer.WriteLine("Content-Dis-data; name=""profileName"";")
			writer.WriteLine()
			writer.WriteLine("fteditorial")
			
			'Write file data:
			writer.WriteLine(boundary)
			writer.WriteLine("Content-Dis-data; name=""123456789""; filename=""listData.csv"";")
			writer.WriteLine("Content-Type: text/plain")
			writer.WriteLine()
			writer.WriteLine("[e-mail],John Smith,07798564352,Brighton")
			writer.WriteLine("[e-mail],Sarah Jones,0779646352,London")
			writer.WriteLine("[e-mail],Bob Samuel,0775354542,Cardiff")
			'TODO: Read the real data from your database or file...
			
			writer.WriteLine(boundary + "--")
			writer.Flush()
		End  Using
		
		Return ms.ToArray()
	End Using
End Function

I've translated this from C#, so it might not be perfect!

Answer 2

User1010400040 posted

I've been trying to upload to Pure360 too.  I wrote my own code at first and after many unsuccessful hours of debugging I searched the net and discovered this site.  I battled to get this to work too - I captured my post requests in Fiddler2 and sent it off to Pure360's support several times (they were very helpful). 

I then discovered that BuildPostData was returning some bogus leading bytes at the beginning of the array.  So I changed the stream writer constructor to ASCII and not UTF8 - lucky guess it now works :-)

StreamWriter

writer = new StreamWriter(memStream, Encoding.ASCII);

I hope this helps someone - it seems a few people have battled with this - including me.

Regards,

Dono