Simple Form Post Example

There's plenty of sites out there that offer services through form POST. Here's a really quick and dirty example of how to submit and receive:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;
namespace ClassLibrary1
{
 public static class FormPostHelper
 {
     public static string FormPost()
     {
         string result = string.Empty;

         //this sets up the request 
         Uri postUri = new Uri("http://www.domain.com/pagetopostto.htm");
         HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(postUri);


         //here you define the form fields
         string xmlToPass = "FormField=Value";

         byte[] bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(xmlToPass);
         request.Method = "POST";
         request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
         request.ContentLength = xmlToPass.Length;



         //open a stream to the target URL
         using (Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())
         {
             requestStream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
         }



         //submit the POST, get the response
         HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

         using (Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
         {
             System.IO.StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(responseStream);
             result = reader.ReadToEnd();
             reader.Close();
         }



         return result;
     }
 }
}