ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Name

HttpRequest

Synopsis

The HttpRequest class wraps all information that a client browser passes to the server during an HTTP request. It includes client certificates, cookies, and values submitted through HTML form elements. You can access this information in its entirety as a System.IO.Stream object through the InputStream property, or you can use one of the more useful higher-level properties.

The QueryString property allows you to retrieve values from the URL’s query string, which can transfer information from one ASP.NET page to another. This query string takes the form of a series of name/value pairs appended to the URL after a question mark (for example, the client request http://www.myapp.com/mypage.aspx?var1=hi will result in a value of “hi” for Request.QueryString("var1")). The QueryString collection is limited to string data and should not contain sensitive information, as it is clearly visible to the user. To ensure compatibility with all browsers, you should not store more than about 1000 bytes in the query string.

The HttpRequest class also exposes an HttpCookieCollection object in the Cookies property. This is a collection of client-side cookies that your script (or other scripts on your server) have created. They are transmitted to the server with each request in the HTTP Cookie header. This collection is read-only. If you want to modify or add a cookie, use the HttpResponse.Cookies property instead.

The HttpRequestClass class provides some frequently used, lower-level ...