Find URL Responses? Alternative To Default WebBrowser Control?

Question

Hello guys I have an issue bugging me for the past few weeks.

What I'm trying to accomplish: I need a webbrowser control with the ability to change user agent (once at start) and referrer. But most important The ability to see the urls responses. What I mean by that for example if you navigate to a website you get back Images/Javascripts files/Dyanmic URLS in response I need access to those urls which some of them have dynamic variables (Regular Webbrowser Control will not show you those & you can't access it in any way beside using fiddler core).

I was able to do that with webbrowser + fiddlercore I can see and do what ever with those urls addresses. The problem was if you run few instances of this program (or sometimes once if the program has some automation to work with the url responses) It gets stuck or doesn't work. I tried fixing it and making it work but it's kind of a hacky solution that doesn't work right. I need a simple way to access those urls just as if you used httpwebrequest but as a webbrowser. Why I need it as a webbrowser? The way I work I need the execution of all the tracking pixels and scripts and images etc.. a normal webbrowser behaivor in httpwebrequest you can't just navigate and all the scripts will be execute as webbrowser, or can you?

Answer 1

Using the System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser control in a WinForms app, set the webBrowser.URL property to the URL of the page you're interested in.

The webbrowser's DocumentCompleted event fires after the page has loaded. Any dynamically loaded JavaScript should be done by then. Hook the DocumentCompleted event and use the webbrowser.Document.Images to get a list of all image elements on the page. From those images you can get their SRC attributes which contains their URLs including any query parameters hanging off the end. You can use webbrowser.Document.Links to get a list of all hyperlinks on the page. For other HTML elements of interest, you can use GetElementsByTagName("foo") to fetch all elements with that tag name from the page, then dig into their attributes to pull out URL properties.

With webbrowser.Document you can get to any HTML element, whether it is statically or dynamically created.

What you can't get to through webbrower.Document is data that is loaded asynchronously using XMLHttpRequest(), because this data is not part of the browser Document Object Model. Web pages with scripted false buttons will be difficult to intercept.

However, if you know where the data is stored by the JavaScript executing on the page, you may be able to access it using webbrowser.Document.InvokeScript(). If the JavaScript on the page stores URLs in a mydata property of the window object, for example, you could try webbrowser.Document.InvokeScript("window.mydata") or some variation to retrieve the value of mydata into the C# app.