Re: Re: Submitting a form

[muradkhan]

SaintMike, thank you for responding. the HTML I've displayed is what is coming back from the server when I get past the login page. I'm trying to accomplish in perl what my mouse and fingers do when I click the 'Yes' button. I read somewhere that in calling the Javascript as I have it, the parameter "continue" gets created (lower case). what does this mean ?

[action => "abort", Continue => "Yes"]

I'm guessing it's an assignment. The Perl Cookbook seems to use single quotes. Does it matter. Murad

[saintmike]

Just checked, if you press the "yes" button, the browser sends


    * action
          o continue 
    * Continue
          o Yes


and if you're pressing "no", you get


    * action
          o continue 
    * Abort
          o No


So, in your code, you need to say


POST 'http://companyname.com/Customer/support/Patch/releases
/ClientDownload/download/download.asp', 
[action => "continue",
 Continue => "Yes"];


to create a HTTP::Request object simulating the "Yes". Check out the documentation on HTTP::Request::Common -- the POST function expects a URL and a reference to an array containing key-value pairs of CGI parameters you want to pass.

If you want to figure out what a browser sends to a server, there's a simple trick: Put a cgi-dump script like

use CGI qw/:standard/;

my($self) = CGI::self_or_CGI();

print header(), 
      start_html('-title'   => "CGI Dump", 
                 '-BGCOLOR' => "white"),   
      h2("Query Parameters:"),
      CGI::as_string(),
      h2("Environment:"),
      (map { p("$_ => $ENV{$_}") } sort keys %ENV),
      end_html();

into a cgi-bin directory of a web server you have control over (it can even be on your local machine). Then, save the HTML of the form you're testing to a local file, and replace its action-URL by the URL to the CGI script on your server (e.g. http://localhost/cgi-bin/dump.cgi). If you then load the local HTML form file into the browser (File->OpenFile) and click on the submit button, the browser will contact your server with the dump-script above and show which parameters have actually been submitted -- this way, you don't need to worry about JavaScript, because the browser takes care of it.