[TriLUG] Web Form Data

[William Sutton]

I think what you're looking for is some custom Perl code using 
LWP::UserAgent (assuming your vendor doesn't mind you automating this and 
can't/won't provide something nicer like a SOAP service).  Basically the 
process is this:

- create an LWP::UserAgent
- login to the form (if necessary)
- chop up your input data
- post to the form with each data entry
- check LWP to make sure that the post was successful and
    - error if not
    - or parse the result (may need HTML::Parser) and save the data 
elsewhere

As I said earlier, if you could pursuade them to provide you a SOAP 
service, life would be a whole lot easier because you eliminate the 
ugliness of having to parse HTML pages and they can perform an on-demand 
lookup on their end.

-- 
William Sutton

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, Mark Freeze wrote:

> I am hoping someone can help me solve an issue we are having at work.
> 
> In the course of a day, we have literally hundreds of account numbers
> we look up on one of our vendors websites.  We are usually just
> looking for a particular status code.  This process takes a huge
> amount of time as the account numbers have to be entered one by one.
> 
> What I am looking to do is to automate this process.  I'd like to
> create a text file of account numbers on my local system, log into the
> website, and then have a script or something march through the account
> numbers automatically, entering them on the vendor's form, retrieve
> the results, and place them into another text file on the local
> system.
> 
> I have seen several companies on the internet that sell software to do
> this, but I'd really like to write it myself.   Can someone kick me in
> the right direction of how to get started on this project?
> 
> Thanks,
> Mark.
>