Sending cookies using HttpCookieCollection and CookieContainer

Question

I want to tunnel through an HTTP request from my server to a remote server, passing through all the cookies. So I create a new HttpWebRequest object and want t

Answer 1

I had a need to do this today for a SharePoint site which uses Forms Based Authentication (FBA). If you try and call an application page without cloning the cookies and assigning a CookieContainer object then the request will fail.

I chose to abstract the job to this handy extension method:

public static CookieContainer GetCookieContainer(this System.Web.HttpRequest SourceHttpRequest, System.Net.HttpWebRequest TargetHttpWebRequest)
    {
        System.Web.HttpCookieCollection sourceCookies = SourceHttpRequest.Cookies;
        if (sourceCookies.Count == 0)
            return null;
        else
        {
            CookieContainer cookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
            for (int i = 0; i < sourceCookies.Count; i++)                
            {
                System.Web.HttpCookie cSource = sourceCookies[i];
                Cookie cookieTarget = new Cookie() { Domain = TargetHttpWebRequest.RequestUri.Host, 
                                                     Name = cSource.Name, 
                                                     Path = cSource.Path, 
                                                     Secure = cSource.Secure, 
                                                     Value = cSource.Value };
                cookieContainer.Add(cookieTarget);
            }
            return cookieContainer;
        }
    }

You can then just call it from any HttpRequest object with a target HttpWebRequest object as a parameter, for example:

HttpWebRequest request;                
request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(TargetUrl);
request.Method = "GET";
request.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
request.CookieContainer = SourceRequest.GetCookieContainer(request);                
request.BeginGetResponse(null, null);

where TargetUrl is the Url of the page I am after and SourceRequest is the HttpRequest of the page I am on currently, retrieved via Page.Request.