Accepting POST data from VBscript

silencer13

Hi all,

I have someone who's trying to POST some xml data to me using VBscript, which I'm totally unfamiliar with.

This is his code, more or less:

Dim postData As String = String.Empty
postData &= [xml code comes here]

Try
  Dim _encoding As New ASCIIEncoding
  Dim _data As Byte() = _encoding.GetBytes(_postData) 

  ' Prepare web request...
  Dim _myRequest As HttpWebRequest
  _myRequest = CType(WebRequest.Create(" destination URL"), HttpWebRequest)

  _myRequest.Method = "POST"
  _myRequest.ContentType = "text/plain"
  _myRequest.ContentLength = _data.Length
  Dim _stream As System.IO.Stream = _myRequest.GetRequestStream
  _stream.Write(_data, 0, _data.Length)
  _stream.Close()

Now my question is - do I need to do anything special to decode the data? Or does the following work:

$xml_data = $POST['data'];

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with this.

greenie2600

You don't need anything special. POST data is POST data; it doesn't matter where it's coming from.

silencer13

greenie2600,
thanks for replying.

I'm just worried about this portion:

Dim encoding As New ASCIIEncoding
Dim data As Byte() = encoding.GetBytes(postData)

What does this do? Can I use the data sent as a string? ie if I do

$xml_data = $POST['data'];
echo $xml_data;

Will I get a [xml data printed on screen? Or do I need to do some decoding to read the data as a string?

greenie2600

I was under the impression that POST data is always ASCII, and that any binary data transmitted as part of a POST header would have to converted to ASCII.

I honestly don't know the answer to your question. Why not try it and see what happens?

silencer13

Thanks, will try it out and post the results here.

silencer13

Well, I tried testing this yesterday, and looks like I'm not getting anything.

The other party says they are sending it as a data stream, anyone knows what that means? Do I need to do anything special to catch a data stream? urldecode or unserialize?

Also, is it possible to POST data without giving it a name?

silencer13

I've finally resolved this, so I thought I'd share this with the community:

Dim postData As String = String.Empty
postData &= [xml code comes here]

Try
Dim encoding As New ASCIIEncoding
Dim data As Byte() = encoding.GetBytes(postData)

' Prepare web request...
Dim myRequest As HttpWebRequest
myRequest = CType(WebRequest.Create(" destination URL"), HttpWebRequest)

myRequest.Method = "POST"
myRequest.ContentType = "text/plain"
myRequest.ContentLength = data.Length
Dim stream As System.IO.Stream = myRequest.GetRequestStream
stream.Write(data, 0, data.Length)
stream.Close()

This VBScript actually sends a stream of data using FORM POST, without any variable name assigned to the data. I understand this is normal for sending XML files.

To read the data stream, I had to use the following PHP code:

$data = file_get_contents('php://input');

This got the data into my variable name $data.

Now it all works fine. 🙂