How to get error information when HttpWebRequest.GetResponse() fails

I faced a similar situation:

I was trying to read raw response in case of an HTTP error consuming a SOAP service, using BasicHTTPBinding.

However, when reading the response using GetResponseStream(), got the error:

Stream not readable

So, this code worked for me:

try
{
    response = basicHTTPBindingClient.CallOperation(request);
}
catch (ProtocolException exception)
{
    var webException = exception.InnerException as WebException;
    var rawResponse = string.Empty;

    var alreadyClosedStream = webException.Response.GetResponseStream() as MemoryStream;
    using (var brandNewStream = new MemoryStream(alreadyClosedStream.ToArray()))
    using (var reader = new StreamReader(brandNewStream))
        rawResponse = reader.ReadToEnd();
}

I came across this question when trying to check if a file existed on an FTP site or not. If the file doesn't exist there will be an error when trying to check its timestamp. But I want to make sure the error is not something else, by checking its type.

The Response property on WebException will be of type FtpWebResponse on which you can check its StatusCode property to see which FTP error you have.

Here's the code I ended up with:

    public static bool FileExists(string host, string username, string password, string filename)
    {
        // create FTP request
        FtpWebRequest request = (FtpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("ftp://" + host + "/" + filename);
        request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password);

        // we want to get date stamp - to see if the file exists
        request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.GetDateTimestamp;

        try
        {
            FtpWebResponse response = (FtpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
            var lastModified = response.LastModified;

            // if we get the last modified date then the file exists
            return true;
        }
        catch (WebException ex)
        {
            var ftpResponse = (FtpWebResponse)ex.Response;

            // if the status code is 'file unavailable' then the file doesn't exist
            // may be different depending upon FTP server software
            if (ftpResponse.StatusCode == FtpStatusCode.ActionNotTakenFileUnavailable)
            {
                return false;
            }

            // some other error - like maybe internet is down
            throw;
        }
    }

Is this possible using HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse?

You could have your web server simply catch and write the exception text into the body of the response, then set status code to 500. Now the client would throw an exception when it encounters a 500 error but you could read the response stream and fetch the message of the exception.

So you could catch a WebException which is what will be thrown if a non 200 status code is returned from the server and read its body:

catch (WebException ex)
{
    using (var stream = ex.Response.GetResponseStream())
    using (var reader = new StreamReader(stream))
    {
        Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd());
    }
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    // Something more serious happened
    // like for example you don't have network access
    // we cannot talk about a server exception here as
    // the server probably was never reached
}