Name
WebRequest
Synopsis
Because many Internet protocols are request-response synchronous protocols,
this class serves as a base type for any and all request-response style
of network communication. As such, a .NET programmer will never create a WebRequest
type directly — instead, a shared method on
this class, Create()
, is used as a
“virtual constructor” to create a subtype of WebRequest
that matches the protocol scheme requested. For example, if the string
http://www.oreilly.com
is passed to Create()
,
an instance of HttpWebRequest
is handed back. Out of
the box, only “http”, “https”, and “file” are supported.
Once obtained, a .NET programmer can manipulate the common properties of the WebRequest
type to control various aspects of the
request. Alternatively, downcast the generic WebRequest
reference to the concrete type returned to access protocol-specific
aspects of that protocol — for example, the returned object
from WebRequest.Create("http://www.oreilly.com")
will be
a HttpWebRequest
, so it is safe to cast it as such.
This allows access to the Accept
and SendChunked
properties/headers in the request. Be
sure to manipulate these properties before the request is sent,
or the modifications will have no effect.
Use the GetResponse()
method to obtain a WebResponse
object corresponding to
the response that the remote server sent. This means that the request
is sent, and the response harvested. The methods BeginGetResponse()
and EndGetResponse()
are
asynchronous versions of GetResponse() ...
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