Chris Alexander

I’ve been doing some work on a super-secret project recently that involves C# and web APIs. As part of this, most of the API calls require HTTP  Basic authorization. This is fairly easy to do, as in C# using a WebClient object you just do this:

WebClient client = new WebClient();

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

client.DownloadFile("http://api.file.here/get.json", "D:\Stuff\Location.doc");

However, the credentials are only sent when the server challenges for authorisation – if it doesn’t explicitly challenge then the credentials aren’t sent. The way around this is to set the header yourself using this little snippet:

WebClient client = new WebClient();

string authInfo = this.credentials.UserName + ":" + this.credentials.Password;
authInfo = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.Default.GetBytes(authInfo));
client.Headers["Authorization"] = "Basic " + authInfo;

client.DownloadFile("http://api.file.here/get.json", "D:\Stuff\Location.doc");

One Response to “HTTP Authorisation in C#”

1. Hossein says:

   July 5, 2010 at 12:45 pm

   Thank you Chris, worked perfectly!