asked on

Can I capture a more meaningful response from a web response in .NET?

If I go into fiddler, I can see this nice message,
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<response>
<error_message ident="card_number rejected: the credit card number was entered incorrectly; the check digit does not match

But the .NET try catch just reports this anemic message,
The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error."	
System.Net.HttpWebResponse webResponse = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();

Craig Wagner

Normally to get the body of the response you'd do this:

string serviceResponse = String.Empty;

using( WebResponseBase webResponse = webRequest.GetResponse() )
{
    using( StreamReader reader = new StreamReader( webResponse.GetResponseStream() ) )
    {
        serviceResponse = reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
}

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However, I'm a little confused by what you're getting. The 500 error usually would indicate that the server threw some sort of fault/exception, but in this case you seem to be getting a 500 response and a response body. If that's the case you may need to break up the above code so you get the response stream and read it in your catch block.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Ted Bouskill

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jagssidurala

Try this

If a WebException is thrown because of a protocol error, its Response
property will give you access to actual response received from the web
server. Just make sure you check the Status property accordingly:

try {
// Do WebRequest
}
catch (WebException ex) {
if (ex.Status == WebExceptionStatus.ProtocolError) {
HttpWebResponse response = ex.Response as HttpWebResponse;
if (response != null) {
// Process response
}
}
}

wilfordrocks

ASKER

Very helpful. Thank you