C＃通过url id下载docx文件（无内容处理）

Question

I've spent about 3-4 days on investigating this via stack overflow and google search engine.

My dilemma is this: I am tasked with displaying a file from a url (not sure if i can simply open it or have to save it to a folder) within a windows form on Visual Studio 2015. The link in question is this but will not work due to this being only accessible via internal network or VPN connected: http://QualityWorkbench/ivscripts/qwbcgi.dll/docfetch?db=live&id=1090

What I've accomplished so far is that that I've built the windows form portion based on this link from a stack overflow article which leads to a blog link:

How to display PDF or Word's DOC/DOCX inside WinForms window?

What I've built very similarly would work for links that have a file name within the url but not the Quality Workbench link mentioned above. An example is this: http://www.e-iceblue.com/images/test.docx

I've researched everywhere and various stack overflow articles talk about checking content disposition via HttpWebResponse headers but when i debug through it, the only headers i saw were these (nothing about content-disposition):

Header Name:Content-Length, Value :411

Header Name:Content-Type, Value :text/html

Header Name:Set-Cookie, Value :IGS_SessionID=53114; path=/; expires=Fri, 03 Jun 2016 14:01:34 GMT,sessionid=2d794a41-43ce-4c6b-96cc-7a832ac39670; path=/; expires=Fri, 03 Jun 2016 14:01:34 GMT

Header Name:Server, Value :Microsoft-IIS/7.5

Header Name:X-Powered-By, Value :ASP.NET

I know what I've listed is pretty vague so I'll be happy to provide any coding details or whatever info anyone needs to decipher my dilemma: how to download a file from a url that only ends with an id using Visual Studio 2015 C#. Ideally opening the file without saving it and display it into a window form is my ideal but I am also content in saving the file into a users download folder.

Answer 1

First of all, you need to make sure the URL you use really provides you a file; as Hintham suggested in his/hers comment, what you receiving is not a docx file.

Second, in your code you need to make a HTTP request to the URL to get the file. Good practice would be to catch transmission and/or HTTP errors. In the response there will be the file if no HTTP errors has occurred during requesting.

The easiest way to do this (in my opinion) would be to engage the WebClient.DownloadData . It will retrieve the file into a byte array so you could fed your WinForms app with it for display. Take a look on the MSDN documentation - it's pretty straight forward.

Answer 2

@bozhidarstoinev - after taking a long break and coming back to it, i reviewed what you provided and then viewed the html source of the link on IE. It was like you said, the link was referencing an html site which contained the real URL download link. I didn't catch it the first time due to fatigue but the true url download link was similarly named to what i provided in my problem save 3 characters added on.

Thanks for setting me on the right path!