Not understanding why WinHTTP does NOT authenticate certain HTTPS resource

Question

I\'d be extremely grateful for any kind of help that may help me resolving the problem.

From Excel VBA code I need to download & parse CSV file from HTTPS site h

Answer 1

And one more thing (in addition to the above solution) one should be aware of in case of using POST requests similar to the above code: for some obscure reason I still got once in 4-5 times (or even more) the hated 406 response from the website, which means in my case auth is NOT complete. After hours of step-by-step debugging I happily caught the cause: auth token value may have + signs, and from analyzing an arrow of several dozens auth tokens / response codes I discovered that +-containing tokens exactly match 406 codes.

The solution became pretty obvious: safely URL-encode +es for the PostData. With the help of http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm I finally came up to the following:

PostData = "authenticity_token=" & Replace(AuthToken, "+", "%2B", vbTextCompare) & _
    "&back_url=https://redmine.itransition.com/projects/" & Trim(RedmineProject) & _
    "/time_entries" & "&username=" & UN & "&password=" & PW & "&login=Login »"

+es are replaced by %2Bs, and this was that - no more 406s!)

The other special chars do not matter in my case, but the lesson was learned. Hope this will save several hours of life for someone else!