Requesting a Web Page
By Efe Aras

Our developer team is working on multi technology software ( I mean macromedia flash, some services on a server with a slow internet connection, being written in C# and a web based software written with ASP). Now I am working on a service that sometimes need to communicate with the web server and get some data. I do not prefer to connect directly to the web server's database because we decided to leave the business logic on the web server. The other alternative was to use web services however why should I use a generic web service, to handle a business logic that will only used by my module. So we decided put a web page that will bring the list of users in XML format. All I would nee to do is connect to web server, pass my parameter in my GET request. It was the purchase order id I would pass and the list of users that are related to that Purchase Order would be passed back in XML format.

//sample purchase order id
string po_id=8;

//The address of the web page
string web_page_address="http://www.acmecompany.com/get_users.asp";


//the parameter is added to the end of the web page with a question mark
//then it will be a child game for that asp page to handle the request

string parameter="?purchase_order_id=" + po_id;

//an instance of WebClient class
WebClient web_client = new WebClient();

//this function returns a byte array
Byte[] page_in_bytes = client.DownloadData(web_page_address + parameter );

//covert the byte array to string
string page_source = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(page_in_bytes);