how to create a decorator proxy page in asp.net 3.5

I am trying to make this feature, and I'm really stuck.

I have two applications that run on the same domain. and I need to have one application load pages from the other one inside it's own (the first) master page.

I have full control of the code of both sides, of course.

I have tries using HTTPRequest, and HTTPResponse, and I have tried using WebBrowser. Both work great as long as I have static(plain HTML) pages. However, those pages are actually dynamic. the user need to press server-side buttons (postback) and generally use the session, viewstate, and/or cookies.

because of that, HTTPRequest and WebBrowser fail me, as they do not cause postback, and therefore those server-side controls are not working. more so, if I try to "fake" a postback by saving the ViewState after each response and than resend it on the next request, after a few (3-4) times the original page will return a "The state information is invalid for this page and might be corrupted" error, even if I use

EnableViewStateMac ="false" EnableSessionState="True" EnableEventValidation ="false" ValidateRequest ="false" ViewStateEncryptionMode ="Never

So... any ideas how can I solve this issue?

Thanks in advance

Solution

What is the main desire here?

Wrap one site's content in another without any architecture changes?

ANSWER: Iframe

Have a single submit button submit from two sites?

ANSWER: Not a good idea. You might be able to kludge this by creating a scraper and parser, but it would only be cool as an "I can do it trophy". Better to rearchitect the solution. But assuming you really want to do this, you will have to parse the result from the embedded site and redirect the submit to the new site. That site will then take the values and submit the form to the first site and wait for the result, which it will scrape to give a response to the user. It is actually quite a bit more complex, as you have to parse the HTML DOM (easier if all of the HTML is XHTML compliant, of course) to figure out what to intercept.

Caveat: Any changes to the embedded site can blow up your code, so the persons who maintain the first site must be aware of this artificially created dependency so they don't change anything that might cause problems. Ouch, that sounds brittle! ;-)

Other?

If using an iFrame does not work, then I would look at the business problem and draw up an ideal architecture to solve it, which might mean making the functionality of the embedded site available via a web service for the second site.