title: Trying to communicate with a REST service with NSIS
body: <p>All I am trying to do is send an HTTP GET with Querystring or HTTP POST to a web service from within a custom page in an NSIS installer.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is that most plugins can upload/download files, but not simply call a service and return the response. The recommend plugin to use is NsisUrlLib. I tried this, and while it works with simple GET requests, it fails and throws an error if you have querystring parameters in the URL, such as:</p>
  
  <pre><code>NsisUrlLib::UrlOpen /NOUNLOAD "http://tc.hwidev.com?var=value"
  Pop $connectResult
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>NSISdl,INetC, and other plugins work with querystrings but can only be used to upload/download files. </p>
  
  <p>I tried using the ExecDos plugin to call cURL.exe from the command line like so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ExecDos::exec /TOSTACK "curl" "http://tc.hwidev.com"
  Pop $connectResult
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But I can't figure out how to get the data returned from the URL passed back to NSIS. The above code just returns an integer into $connectResult which probably represents the return code from CURL. How do I get the actual HTML returned from the URL onto the NSIS stack or into a variable?</p>
  
  <p>Alternatively, can anyone recommend a better way to accomplish this? Calling a webservice seems so basic that thousands of people should have already figured this out.</p>