Improve WebClient by adding UserAgent and Cookies to your requests

Suppose you need to make a lot of web requests and you need to set/change your user agent or to add cookies. You cannot do this by using the default WebClient in ASP.net but you can do it by extending this class:

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Net;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class CGWebClient : WebClient
{
	private System.Net.CookieContainer cookieContainer;
	private string userAgent;
	private int timeout;

	public System.Net.CookieContainer CookieContainer
	{
		get { return cookieContainer; }
		set { cookieContainer = value; }
	}

	public string UserAgent
	{
		get { return userAgent; }
		set { userAgent = value; }
	}

	public int Timeout
	{
		get { return timeout; }
		set { timeout = value; }
	}

	public CGWebClient()
	{
		timeout = -1;
		userAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)";
		cookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
		cookieContainer.Add(new Cookie("example", "example_value"));
	}

	protected override WebRequest GetWebRequest(Uri address)
	{
		WebRequest request = base.GetWebRequest(address);
		RefreshUserAgent();

		if (request.GetType() == typeof(HttpWebRequest))
		{
			((HttpWebRequest)request).CookieContainer = cookieContainer;
			((HttpWebRequest)request).UserAgent = userAgent;
			((HttpWebRequest)request).Timeout = timeout;
		}

		return request;
	}

	private void RefreshUserAgent()
	{
		List<string> UserAgents = new List<string>();
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; AOL 9.5; AOLBuild 4337.43; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; AOL 9.5; AOLBuild 4337.34; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pl-PL; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/20121223 Ubuntu/9.25 (jaunty) Firefox/3.8");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ja; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090402 Firefox/3.6a1pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090423 Firefox/3.5b4 GTB5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Avant Browser; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; MAXTHON 2.0)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 5.1; Media Center PC 3.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1)");
		UserAgents.Add("Opera/9.70 (Linux i686 ; U; zh-cn) Presto/2.2.0");
		UserAgents.Add("Opera 9.7 (Windows NT 5.2; U; en)");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8pre) Gecko/20070928 Firefox/2.0.0.7 Navigator/9.0RC1");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7pre) Gecko/20070815 Firefox/2.0.0.6 Navigator/9.0b3");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en) AppleWebKit/526.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0dp1 Safari/526.8");
		UserAgents.Add("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; ru-RU) AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16");
		UserAgents.Add("Opera/9.64 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; en) Presto/2.1.1");

		Random r = new Random();
		this.UserAgent  = UserAgents[r.Next(0, UserAgents.Count)];

		UserAgents = null;
	}


}

Enjoy!

Linq in DataSet

I recently had to filter and order some datasets. I used Linq and I found it to be very nice.
Here are a few examples:

1. If you have a dataset with a table containing products and you want to search for all products having “test” in their name, and order the list by creation date, you can use something like:

DataTable dt = ds.Tables[0]
			.AsEnumerable()
			.Where(o => o.Field<string>("Name").Contains("test"))
			.OrderBy(o => o.Field<DateTime>("CreationDate"))
			.CopyToDataTable();

2. Alternatively, if you have to order a report each time a column name is pressed, you can write you own method that orders a table by a given column:

private DataTable OrderDataTable<T>(DataTable dt, string orderby, string orderdir)
	{
	if(orderdir == "ASC")
		return dt.AsEnumerable().OrderBy(o => o.Field<T>(orderby)).CopyToDataTable();
	else
		return dt.AsEnumerable().OrderByDescending(o => o.Field<T>(orderby)).CopyToDataTable();
	}

and you can use it like this:

switch (orderby1)
	{
	case "Keyphrase":
		repMain.DataSource = OrderDataTable<String>(ds.Tables[0], orderby1, orderdir1);
		break;
	case "KEI":
		repMain.DataSource = OrderDataTable<Double>(ds.Tables[0], orderby1, orderdir1);
		break;
	default:
		repMain.DataSource = OrderDataTable<Int32>(ds.Tables[0], orderby1, orderdir1);	
		break;
	}

Have fun!