HTTPSocket Class

Used to send and receive data via the HTTP protocol.

Events

AuthenticationRequired	HeadersReceived
Connected	PageReceived
DownloadComplete	ReceiveProgress
Error	SendProgress
ErrorCode

Properties

Methods

ClearRequestHeaders	Post
EncodeFormData	SetFormData
Get	SetPostContent
GetHeaders	SetRequestHeader
PageHeaders

More information available in parent classes: TCPSocket:SocketCore:Object

Notes

Use the HTTPSocket class to send and receive data via the HTTP protocol. Since this is a subclass of the TCPSocket class, all the standard socket APIs are also available. To perform secure communications via HTTP, use the HTTPSecureSocket class instead. It is otherwise identical, except that it is subclassed from SSLSocket instead of TCPSocket. This makes all the options for encrypted communications available to HTTPSecureSocket objects.

If you use a constructor in a subclass of HTTPSocket, you must call the super class's constructor in your subclass's constructor. The subclass fail with error 107 when you try to download.

When using the optional Timeout parameter of the Get, GetHeaders, or Post methods the page will be received or posted in a synchronous manner. That is, REALbasic will wait until the page has been received or posted before it proceeds. If Timeout is set to zero, the socket will wait indefinitely or until it receives an error.

To use synchronous mode, simply pass the optional parameter. For example,

Dim http as New HTTPSocket
MsgBox http.Get("www.realsoftware.com",30)

When using synchronous mode, you can set the Yield property to True to tell the socket to yield time to other events and code to execute while waiting. Simply insert a statement such as

http.Yield= True

to allow background processes to execute while waiting.

Example

The following example retrieves the specified URL:

Dim socket1 as New HTTPSocket
socket1.get "http://www.realsoftware.com/"

The following example posts a simple form:

Dim form as Dictionary
Dim socket1 as New HTTPSocket

// create and populate the form object
form = New Dictionary
form.value("firstname") = "Bob"
form.value("lastname") = "Brown"

// setup the socket to POST the form
socket1.setFormData form
socket1.post "http://www.myformlocation.com/form.php"