Getting StatusCode, StatusDescription and ResponseUri from System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException

Question

Hi

My app is throwing a System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException when an API I use (Postmark) can't connect due to in my case proxy issues.

ex.message only gives me "An error occurred while sending the request." which is not much use in diagnosing cause

Looking in ex.message.innerexception I can see "The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden." which is more useful but still doesn't solve my problem

If I run the app in VS I can see that in InnerException there is Response which contains more detailed information which contains what I need to know to solve the problem e.g. StatusCode, StatusDescription and ResponseUri

My question is how can I access these values from my code when not running in debugger as the obvious ex.InnerException.Response.StatusCode doesn't work as "Response is not a member of Exception" despite it appearing as so in debugger

Answer 1

If you know the possible type of the exception (WebException for example, which can be determined during debugging), then try something like this:

Try
    '...
Catch exc As Exception
    Dim web_exc As WebException = TryCast(exc.InnerException, WebException)
    If web_exc IsNot Nothing Then
        Dim response As HttpWebResponse = TryCast(web_exc.Response, HttpWebResponse)
        If response IsNot Nothing Then
            Dim status = response.StatusCode
            '...
        End If
    End If
End Try