Accessing secured pages in C# with HTTPWebRequest

In this guide, we'll show you how to access secured page (protected by basic authentication) using C# and the HTTPWebRequest library to convert them to PDF using PDFShift's API.

When you're converting a document, you might want to access a secured page (protected by basic authentication) to convert it to PDF. This can be done by setting the auth parameter to the request.

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

// You can get an API key at https://pdfshift.io
var apiKey = "sk_xxxxxxxxxxxx";

var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf");
request.Method = "POST";
request.ContentType = "application/json";
request.Headers.Add("X-API-Key", apiKey);

var payload = new
{
    source = "https://www.example.com",
    // You can set a basic authentication by passing the "auth" property which contains a username and password
    auth = new
    {
        username = "user",
        password = "password"
    }
};

var json = System.Text.Json.JsonSerializer.Serialize(payload);
byte[] data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(json);
request.ContentLength = data.Length;

using (var stream = request.GetRequestStream())
{
    stream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
}

try
{
    var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
    
    // Handle errors:
    if (response.StatusCode >= HttpStatusCode.BadRequest)
    {
        throw new Exception($"Request failed with status code {response.StatusCode}");
    }

    using (var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
    {
        var result = reader.ReadToEnd();
        File.WriteAllText("result.pdf", result);
    }

    Console.WriteLine("The PDF document was generated and saved to result.pdf");
}
catch (WebException ex)
{
    Console.WriteLine($"Error: {ex.Message}");
}

This allows you to protect your documents from any visitors while allowing PDFShift to access the page and convert it to PDF.

For further details on the auth property and its usage, please refer to our dedicated documentation.

We hope this guide was helpful. If you have any questions or noticed any issues on the code above,
feel free to drop us a line.