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Automating Interaction with a mostly JavaScript site

by OfficeLinebacker (Chaplain)
on Oct 16, 2013 at 00:32 UTC ( [id://1058373]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

OfficeLinebacker has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings, esteemed monks!

We often run out of recording space on our webex account. It has been proposed to write a script that automatically checks the recordings and downloads the oldest ones to a folder on our shared drive and deletes them off webex.

I have started playing around and the site is mostly JavaScript (e.g. the "Host login button" is 'javascript:Logon()' as opposed to a URL. I think I remember automating interaction with such a site a loooong time ago and IIRC, the way to go was to watch the header/response traffic between the browser and the web site and mimic that using LWP::UserAgent/WWW::Mechanize. I just want do double check here before I jump down a rabbit hole to see if there is any advice wrought on the anvils of experience that the PM community can provide.

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Re: Automating Interaction with a mostly JavaScript site
by davido (Cardinal) on Oct 16, 2013 at 00:54 UTC

    I dont know the answer to the following question, but you may consider looking into it further: Doesn't the webex API provide a more elegant means than screen scraping?


    Dave

      I didn't realize they had an API. I'll have to look into that.

        Finding out of a target site/service provides an API is an imporant piece of research, best done early on.

      OK, I just found out that the type of account I'm concerned with (the so-called "online" account, for meetings of up to 25 people) doesn't work with the API. So I'm back to Anonymous Monk's reply.

        I'm sure that is by design; a more useful API is one of the selling features of the higher priced account. Too bad though.


        Dave

Re: Automating Interaction with a mostly JavaScript site (The State of Web spidering in Perl)
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 16, 2013 at 00:37 UTC

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