Posting Form Data to Remote Site using HttpWebRequest

Last Updated January 17, 2019 by Tim Trott. First Published in 2011.

Easily send data using HttpWebRequest Post. The data is sent via the HTTP POST method to a remote server from your code behind.

This global code snippet for using HttpWebRequest Post can be used from a code behind web form, console application or Windows form application.

string oid = "364826B3-7D29-4C2E-9568-C318C2B45F0C";
string retURL = CurrentPage.Url;
string remoteUrl = https://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?encoding=UTF-8";
string name = Request.Form["name"];
string email = Request.Form["email"];

// Setup the POST data
string poststring = String.Format("oid={0}&amp;retURL={1}&amp;name={2}&amp;email={3}", oid, retURL, name, email);
HttpWebRequest httpRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(remoteUrl);

httpRequest.Method = "POST";
httpRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

// Convert the post string to a byte array
byte[] bytedata = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(poststring);
httpRequest.ContentLength = bytedata.Length;

// Create the stream
Stream requestStream = httpRequest.GetRequestStream();
requestStream.Write(bytedata, 0, bytedata.Length);
requestStream.Close();

// Get the response from remote server
HttpWebResponse httpWebResponse = (HttpWebResponse)httpRequest.GetResponse();
Stream responseStream = httpWebResponse.GetResponseStream();

System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(responseStream, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8))
{
    string line;
    while ((line = reader.ReadLine()) != null)
    {
        sb.Append(line);
    }
}

string serverResponse = sb.ToString();

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