[Hartford-pm] Re: [Boston.pm] Help using LWP to change password Q's?

[Uri Guttman]

>>>>> "BM" == Bob Mariotti <r.mariotti at financialdatacorp.com> writes:

  BM> I have several reasonably complex scripts that use LWP to interact
  BM> with a remote secured web site.  Works great and reliably.  Now
  BM> the remote service site has implemented expiring passwords
  BM> requiring the clients (my script) to change passwords periodically
  BM> before its next access.

  BM> Q: How does the "submit" button interrelate with the "next" URL?

  BM> Example:

  BM> Initial https connect to specified page :
  BM> https://xxx.yyy.com/ssp/jsp/blah.jsp

  BM> LWP received the resulting page successfully which contains a form that
  BM> has fields for username, current password, new password, new password
  BM> again.  The usual stuff.

  BM> By examining the received HTML code I determined the fieldnames used
  BM> above so that I could load them on my next POST operation.  I also noted
  BM> that on the FORM statement the value of the ACTION parameter was
  BM> "ABC123" with NO extension.   Also, the SUBMIT tag has an onClick
  BM> function similar to this:  "onClick="return subrname()".

  BM> I assume that if the LWP POST operation is performed it emulates someone
  BM> clicking on the SUBMIT button.  The subroutine is a javascript editing
  BM> routine that issues an alert(msg) and returns false or true.

first, i would recommend using WWW::Mechanize for this. it will remove a
large chunk of your lwp code (it inherits from LWP). it makes fetching
pages and filling/clicking on them much simpler.

if the form tag has a URL for its action, then you can ignore the
onclick. it may be calling some javascript to verify stuff but that is
bogus. only the server should be doing data verification for real
(anyone who uses only javascript for this has a large hole waiting to be
explored).

uri

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