C# Windows Forms App - send request by opening html

Question

I made a simple html testpage. If the page is opened ( http://localhost/cut/public/updateFile ) then I send a timestamp to my webserver, where the value is written into a file date.txt eg:

4/8/2017 @ 14:50:19

I also wrote a C# Windows Forms App which makes a request to the webserver to get the value of this file (date.txt), every X seconds.

My goal is to show the current time in a notification box every X seconds by reading it from the file on the server (for practice only)

However, before I get the file content, I need to update it first of course to get the current date and time.

Is it possible to solve this with the rules defined above? This is my attempt:

    private void timerA_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        sendWebRequest("http://localhost/cut/public/updateFile");
        timerA.Stop();
        timerA2.Interval = 5000;
        timerA2.Start();
    }


    private void timerA2_tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

        //Returns the content of date.txt
        string response = sendWebRequest("http://localhost/cut/public/fileApi?action=read&targetFile=date");  

        //Show Notification
        notifyIcon1.Visible = true;
        notifyIcon1.Icon = SystemIcons.Exclamation;
        notifyIcon1.BalloonTipTitle = "File content";
        notifyIcon1.BalloonTipText = response;
        notifyIcon1.BalloonTipIcon = ToolTipIcon.Info;
        notifyIcon1.ShowBalloonTip(10000);

        timerA2.Stop();
        timerA.Start();
    }

    /**
     * Send request and get response as string
     */
    public static string sendWebRequest(string URL)
    {
        WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(URL);
        WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();

        StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());

        return (string)streamReader.ReadToEnd();

    }

However I always get 4/8/2017 @ 14:50:19 it does not update as It should.

It obviously does not work this way, since WebRequest.Create does only gets the html file as it is and delivers it back to my C# Application, but it does not execute the javascript where I make the request to the server.

I only created this example above to ask if it is somehow possible to achive this at this way or if C# is not designed to solve problems like this?

My only idea is to create a hidden webbrowser in my Form1 and open http://localhost/cut/public/updateFile to start the update but I am not sure if this even works.

---

I created a webbrowser element and call the update URL like this:

webBrowser1.Navigate("http://localhost/cut/public/updateFile");

However, there are plenty of script error messages, which are found in the jquery file.

And my script won't work either because of the not working jquery. So I guess it would work, but not with jquery, or I have to fix all errors in the jQuery file.

How to solve this problem?

Answer 1

You should open http://localhost/cut/public/updateFile from a real browser, which will execute the javascript on the page. Requesting this page from a windows form application with a WebRequest will just return the contents of the page, but will not process or execute the javascript on the page because it is not rendered or processed.

Answer 2

I solved it by adding a webbrowser element to my Form, and calling the URL inside of it like this:

    webBrowser1.Navigate("http://localhost/cut/public/updateFile");

However, I had to rewrote my javascript to make it work without jQuery, since the C# Webbrowser appears to be an extremly old Internet Explorer with no support for nothing. There were plenty alerts pointing to script errors like the one below:

Now it works as expected. I hope someday somebody will come across with a much better solution than this though.

UPDATE

I was able to change the browser to the latest available by adding this line to my html head section:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"/>
<!-- IE=edge instructs the WebBrowser control to use the latest version of IE it supports -->