How do I manage sessions and cookies in IronWebScraper?

IronWebScraper is a web scraping library for .NET that simplifies the process of crawling and extracting data from websites. It's designed to handle complex scraping tasks including managing sessions and cookies.

To manage sessions and cookies with IronWebScraper, you need to understand how it handles these elements internally. When you create a new instance of the WebScraper class, it maintains its own session and can store cookies automatically between requests. Here's how you can work with sessions and cookies:

Managing Cookies

IronWebScraper automatically handles cookies for each session. Cookies received from the web server in responses are stored and sent back to the server in subsequent requests, emulating a browser's behavior.

However, if you need to add custom cookies to your requests or read the cookies that are being sent and received, you can do so by accessing the Cookies property on the Request and Response objects.

Here's an example of how you can add a custom cookie to your request:

using IronWebScraper;

public class MyScraper : WebScraper
{
    public override void Init()
    {
        // Create a new request
        this.Request("https://example.com", Parse);

        // Add a custom cookie
        this.HttpRequest.Cookies.Add(new System.Net.Cookie("my_cookie", "cookie_value", "/", ".example.com"));
    }

    public override void Parse(Response response)
    {
        // Here you can access response.Cookies to inspect cookies received from the server
        foreach (var cookie in response.Cookies)
        {
            Console.WriteLine($"{cookie.Name} - {cookie.Value}");
        }

        // Process the response content
        // ...
    }
}

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var scraper = new MyScraper();
        scraper.Start();
    }
}

Managing Sessions

Sessions are implicitly managed through cookies, as most web applications use cookies to track sessions. If your target website uses a session identifier stored in a cookie, IronWebScraper will automatically handle this as long as you're using the same WebScraper instance for your requests.

If you need to manually manage sessions, for example, by adding headers or other session-related data to your requests, you can modify the HttpRequest object before sending the request:

public override void Init()
{
    // Set up a custom header for session management (if needed)
    this.HttpRequest.AddHeader("X-Session-Token", "your_session_token");

    // Proceed with your request
    this.Request("https://example.com", Parse);
}

Persisting Sessions Between Scraping Runs

If you need to persist session data between different runs of your scraper, you will have to serialize and save the cookie data to a file or a database after your scraping job is complete and then load and apply this data when initializing a new scraping job.

// Example of saving cookies after scraping
public override void Parse(Response response)
{
    // Serialize response.Cookies to a file or database
}

// Example of loading cookies in a new scraping session
public override void Init()
{
    // Load cookies from the file or database and add them to the HttpRequest.Cookies
}

Remember that handling cookies and session data is crucial for maintaining state between requests, especially when dealing with web applications that require authentication or track user sessions. Always ensure that you comply with the website's terms of service and privacy policies when scraping and managing cookies and sessions.