How do I authenticate a WebClient request?

Question

I am making a call to a page on my site using webclient. I'm trying to get the result of the webpage put into a pdf so I am trying to get a string representation of the rendered page. The problem is that the request is not authenticated so all I get is a login screen. I have sent the UseDefaultCredentials property to true but I still get the same result. Below is a portion of my code:

 WebClient webClient = new WebClient();
 webClient.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;

 webClient.UseDefaultCredentials = true;
 return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(webClient.UploadValues(link, "POST",form));

Solution 1

What kind of authentication are you using? If it's Forms authentication, then at best, you'll have to find the .ASPXAUTH cookie and pass it in the WebClient request.

At worst, it won't work.

Solution 2

You need to give the WebClient object the credentials. Something like this...

 WebClient client = new WebClient();
 client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("username", "password");