HTTP Task
This task will perform a HTTP request of the method specified against a web server. This is used when communicating with REST, SOAP and XML-RPC based web services. Please note that the task does not support redirects, so you must enter the actual URL in the task's settings.
Settings
Contents Field
Optional
Raw data to be submitted via a POST request can be entered here.
Encoding Type
Required
The encoding to use for requests and the response. If a charset is specified in the response headers, it will override this setting. The available encodings are UTF8, UTF7, ASCII and Unicode.
Form Values
Optional
The collection of Key-Value pairs for submitting forms to websites or where data needs to be supplied in a 'Named Value Collection'.
Header Values
Optional
The collection of Key-Value pairs containing header information where it needs to be specified. This can be used to specify Content-type or other headers such as SOAP envelope properties.
Input
Optional
The input file or data to send to the web server in the body of the request.
Method
Required
The method of the request, in most cases GET is used to fetch a page and POST is used to send information to a web server. The methods available are GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE and HEAD which are used when making REST, SOAP or XML-RPC calls.
Output File
Optional
The file to output the response returned by the web server.
Password
Optional
The password to use for HTTP basic authentication. Only required when the web server requires basic authentication.
Retry Count
Required
The number of times to retry the underlying connection if an error occurs.
Timeout
Required
The amount of time in milliseconds to wait for the web server to respond to the HTTP request. Defaults to 120000 milliseconds (2 minutes).
URL
Required
The full URL to send the HTTP request to e.g. http://www.example.com
User Agent
Optional
The value to use for the User-Agent header in the HTTP request. Defaults to Zynk Software Ltd/Zynk.
Username
Optional
The username to use for HTTP basic authentication. Only required when the web server requires basic authentication.
Zynk Settings
Examples
Fetching a Web page or making a REST call
- Set the URL to http://www.google.com (or any address you want to grab)
- Set the Method to GET
- Set the Output File to c:\google.html
Posting data to a Web page or making a REST POST method call
- Set the URL to http://www.example.com/ (or any address you want to post to)
- Set the Method to POST
- Set the Input File to c:\data.xml where the file contains the data to be posted
You can find further examples of how to use this task in the ExpenseOnce article.