HttpWebRequest Not Supporting Frames (example included)

[Chris Crabtree]

ok,

So I ran into this problem today with HttpWebRequest and a website
using framesets. I get the response "This page uses frames, but your
browser does not support them."

The only post I can find on the web regarding this issue suggest
setting the UserAgent property to a recognizable browser, so I traced
IE 6 and added the same UserAgent string that it uses. No avail. I
imagine that there must be something wrong with the way I'm doing
this. It appears to be happening with any website I try that uses
frames. Since there is so little mentioned of this problem on the
net, it must be me, I highly doubt I've discovered some big problem.

I've created a very small console app to duplicate the problem. The
code is found below: Please try it yourself and tell me if you can
discover any means to overcome this issue.

Thanks,

Chris
------------------
using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;

namespace TestFramesWebRequest
{
class Class1
{
[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Uri uri = new Uri("http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com");
HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(uri);
req.UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;
..NET CLR 1.1.4322)";

HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
Stream s = resp.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader srReadToEnd = new StreamReader(
resp.GetResponseStream() );
Console.WriteLine(srReadToEnd.ReadToEnd());
srReadToEnd.Close();
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}

 

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

So I ran into this problem today with HttpWebRequest and a website
using framesets. I get the response "This page uses frames, but your
browser does not support them."

That's not because the site actually thinks the browser doesn't support
frames - it's because a user would only see that text if their browser
had ignored the framesets contained within the HTML.

HttpWebRequest doesn't and shouldn't need to have any explicit support
for frames.

 

[Joerg Jooss]

ok,

So I ran into this problem today with HttpWebRequest and a website
using framesets. I get the response "This page uses frames, but your
browser does not support them."

The only post I can find on the web regarding this issue suggest
setting the UserAgent property to a recognizable browser, so I traced
IE 6 and added the same UserAgent string that it uses. No avail. I
imagine that there must be something wrong with the way I'm doing
this. It appears to be happening with any website I try that uses
frames. Since there is so little mentioned of this problem on the
net, it must be me, I highly doubt I've discovered some big problem.

[...]

It's you ;-)

http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com for example returns nested HTML frameset
with the frames "navbar", "panel_header", and "panel". It's up to the client
(your code) to load these individual frames using their "src" attributes.
That's exactly what your browser would do in this case.

Cheers,