How to add cookies to WebRequest?

Question

I am trying to unit test some code, and I need to to replace this:

  HttpWebRequest httpWebRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create( uri );
  httpWebReque         


        

Answer 1

dlev's answer ended up working, but I had problems implementing the solution ("The parameter '{0}' cannot be an empty string."), so I decided to write the full code in case anybody else has similar problems.

My goal was to get the html as a string, but I needed to add the cookies to the web request. This is the function that downloads the string using the cookies:

public static string DownloadString(string url, Encoding encoding, IDictionary cookieNameValues)
{
    using (var webClient = new WebClient())
    {
        var uri = new Uri(url);
        var webRequest = WebRequest.Create(uri);
        foreach(var nameValue in cookieNameValues)
        {
            webRequest.TryAddCookie(new Cookie(nameValue.Key, nameValue.Value, "/", uri.Host));
        }                
        var response = webRequest.GetResponse();
        var receiveStream = response.GetResponseStream();
        var readStream = new StreamReader(receiveStream, encoding);
        var htmlCode = readStream.ReadToEnd();                
        return htmlCode;
    }
}   

We are using the code from dlev's answer:

public static bool TryAddCookie(this WebRequest webRequest, Cookie cookie)
{
    HttpWebRequest httpRequest = webRequest as HttpWebRequest;
    if (httpRequest == null)
    {
        return false;
    }

    if (httpRequest.CookieContainer == null)
    {
        httpRequest.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
    }

    httpRequest.CookieContainer.Add(cookie);
    return true;
}

This is how you use the full code:

var cookieNameValues = new Dictionary();
cookieNameValues.Add("varName", "varValue");
var htmlResult = DownloadString(url, Encoding.UTF8, cookieNameValues);