Getting the Response of a Asynchronous HttpWebRequest

Question

Im wondering if theres an easy way to get the response of an async httpwebrequest.

I have already seen this question here but all im trying to do is return the response (which is usually json or xml) in the form of a string to another method where i can then parse it/ deal with it accordingly.

Heres some code:

I have these two static methods here which i think are thread safe as all the params are passed in and there are no shared local variables that the methods use?

public static void MakeAsyncRequest(string url, string contentType)
{
    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
    request.ContentType = contentType;
    request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Get;
    request.Timeout = 20000;
    request.Proxy = null;

    request.BeginGetResponse(new AsyncCallback(ReadCallback), request);
}

private static void ReadCallback(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
{
    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)asyncResult.AsyncState;
    try
    {
        using (HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.EndGetResponse(asyncResult))
        {
            Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream();
            using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(responseStream))
            {
                //Need to return this response 
                string strContent = sr.ReadToEnd();
            }
       }
       manualResetEvent.Set();
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        throw ex;
   }
}

Answer 1

Assuming the problem is that you're having a hard time getting to the returned content, the easiest path would likely be using async/await if you can use it. Even better would be to switch to HttpClient if you're using .NET 4.5 since it's 'natively' async.

Using .NET 4 and C# 4, you can still use Task to wrap these and make it a bit easier to access the eventual result. For instance, one option would be the below. Note that it has the Main method blocking until the content string is available, but in a 'real' scenario you'd likely pass the task to something else or string another ContinueWith off of it or whatever.

void Main()
{
    var task = MakeAsyncRequest("http://www.google.com", "text/html");
    Console.WriteLine ("Got response of {0}", task.Result);
}

// Define other methods and classes here
public static Task<string> MakeAsyncRequest(string url, string contentType)
{
    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
    request.ContentType = contentType;
    request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Get;
    request.Timeout = 20000;
    request.Proxy = null;

    Task<WebResponse> task = Task.Factory.FromAsync(
        request.BeginGetResponse,
        asyncResult => request.EndGetResponse(asyncResult),
        (object)null);

    return task.ContinueWith(t => ReadStreamFromResponse(t.Result));
}

private static string ReadStreamFromResponse(WebResponse response)
{
    using (Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
    using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(responseStream))
    {
        //Need to return this response 
        string strContent = sr.ReadToEnd();
        return strContent;
    }
}