Sending HTTP POST with System.Net.WebClient

Question

Is it possible to send HTTP POST with some form data with System.Net.WebClient?

If not, is there another library like WebClient that can do HTTP POST? I know I can use System.Net.HttpWebRequest, but I'm looking for something that is not as verbose.

Hopefully it will look like this:

Using client As New TheHTTPLib     client.FormData("parm1") = "somevalue"     result = client.DownloadString(someurl, Method.POST) End Using 

Answer 1

Based on @carlosfigueira 's answer, I looked further into WebClient's methods and found UploadValues, which is exactly what I want:

Using client As New Net.WebClient     Dim reqparm As New Specialized.NameValueCollection     reqparm.Add("param1", "somevalue")     reqparm.Add("param2", "othervalue")     Dim responsebytes = client.UploadValues(someurl, "POST", reqparm)     Dim responsebody = (New Text.UTF8Encoding).GetString(responsebytes) End Using 

The key part is this:

client.UploadValues(someurl, "POST", reqparm) 

It sends whatever verb I type in, and it also helps me create a properly url encoded form data, I just have to supply the parameters as a namevaluecollection.

Answer 2

WebClient doesn't have a direct support for form data, but you can send a HTTP post by using the UploadString method:

Using client as new WebClient     result = client.UploadString(someurl, "param1=somevalue&param2=othervalue") End Using