Display response from the web server in pop up window

Question

I have a Windows Form which submits a POST request to a web server. This will return an url.

Something like this when you do a curl to web server:

curl -d 'info={ "EmployeeID": [ "1234567", "7654321" ], "Salary": true, "BonusPercentage": 10}' http://example.com/xyz/php/api/createjob.php

URL returned:

http://example.com/xyz#newjobapi:id=19

Now I would like to replicate the above process on a windows form which when user clicks the button, it will POST the required information from the Windows form to the server.

But i dont get any response upon clicking the button. It just shows an empty messageBox.

Kindly let me how to display the url returned by the server to the user as a pop up window. Thanks.

My C# Code:

private void button8_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    HttpWebRequest webRequest;
    string requestParams = "\'info={ \"EmployeeID\": [ \"1234567\", \"7654321\" ], \"Salary\": true, \"BonusPercentage\": 10}\'"; 
    byte[] byteArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(requestParams);


    webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://example.com/xyz/php/api/createjob.php");

    webRequest.Method = "POST";
    webRequest.ContentType = "application/json";            
    webRequest.ContentLength = byteArray.Length;

    using (Stream requestStream = webRequest.GetRequestStream())
    {
        requestStream.Write(byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length);
    }

    // Get the response.
    using (WebResponse response = webRequest.GetResponse())
    {
        using (Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
        {
            StreamReader rdr = new StreamReader(responseStream, Encoding.UTF8);
            string Json = rdr.ReadToEnd(); // response from server
            MessageBox.Show("URL Returned: " + Json);

        }
    }
}

Answer 1

If I execute this:

curl --trace con -d "info={ 'Blah': 10}" http://example.com/xyz/php/api/createjob.php

This is part of the output:

00a0: 0d 0a 43 6f 6e 74 65 6e 74 2d 54 79 70 65 3a 20 ..Content-Type:
00b0: 61 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 69 6f 6e 2f 78 2d 77 77 application/x-ww
00c0: 77 2d 66 6f 72 6d 2d 75 72 6c 65 6e 63 6f 64 65 w-form-urlencode
00d0: 64 0d 0a 0d 0a                                  d....

And that means that this:

webRequest.ContentType = "application/json"; 

Isn't sending data in a way that PHP make sense of it. My guess is PHP is doing something like this $info = $_POST['info'] serverside. It is expecting a form values to be posted.

Instead you should send what curl is sending:

webRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"; 

As that will send a form and populate the $_POST array in PHP.