Howto set or overwrite document.referrer?

[Paul Porzky]

Hi there,

i am working on some test cases for our piwik installation and ran into a problem with custom referrers. Maybe you can point me into the right direction...

While it is possible to set a custom Referrer using page.customHeaders (verified using wireshark), it is not accessible in the context of the web page using "document.referrer".

Here is a simple test case. Is it possible to manually overwrite "document.referrer" from within the phantomjs script ?

var page = require('webpage').create();

var url = "http://example.com/";

console.log('Loading ' + url);

page.customHeaders = {

        "Referer" : "http://referrer.example.com/"

};

page.onLoadFinished = function(status){

var referrer = page.evaluate(function () {

       return document.referrer;

    });

    console.log('document.referrer is ' + referrer);

    phantom.exit();

};

page.open(url);

Thanks a lot and

Best Regards,

Paul

[Paul Porzky]

i found at least a workaround to fake the referrer by injecting a link into the page i want to show as the referrer and then simulate a click on it. I've shared the script here: https://gist.github.com/3453137

This however involves loading one more page and can lead to difficulties in case of errors while loading.

Best Regards,

Paul

[Ariya Hidayat]

I am not an expert with the referrer but you might want to use
onInitialized trick to override its value. Check the latest
mailing-list posts for details.

Regards,


--
Ariya Hidayat, http://ariya.ofilabs.com
http://twitter.com/ariyahidayat

[Paul Porzky]

Hi Ariya,

thanks for your quick reply & hint! I tried the onInitialized trick but window.document.referrer does not want to play with me [1].

I am currently browsing the source and it looks like it boils down to the use of QNetworkRequest instead of ResourceRequest in WebPage::openUrl [2]. 

String Document::referrer() const [3] relies on the FrameLoaders ResourceRequest's function httpReferrer to return the referrer:

String httpReferrer() const { return httpHeaderField("Referer"); }[4]

It seems to me that QNetworkRequest's request.setRawHeader() does not have an impact on these Fields. I am currently trying to replace QNetworkRequest with ResourceRequest in webpage.cpp.

Regards,

Paul

--

[1] Try to overwrite window.document.referrer: https://gist.github.com/3481673

[2] webpage.cpp line 538

[3] Document.cpp line 3669

[4] ResourceRequestBase.h line 109

 

[Paul Porzky]

Hi again,

my above assumption was wrong. Instead, Webpage::openUrl just did not pass the custom header data (as set by WebPage::setCustomHeaders) to the request object.

Here is my fix: https://github.com/papoms/phantomjs/commit/6f738b06a02e2aaee1c18859b76132e5932334e0

Let me know if you want me to send a pull request or open an issue.

Thanks,

Paul

[Pierre M.]

Hi Paul,

I am interested by the patch that you created (https://github.com/papoms/phantomjs/compare/set-custom-headers-within-request), but at this day no pull request was created on the main phantomJS repository.

As it is your creation, I wanted to ask if you could send a pull request ?

Or may I fork the project myself and ask for this request ?

Thanks a lot,

Regards,
Pierre

[Sam Attah]

Hi, I need some help with this. Would you mind helping? 

[Paul Porzky]

Sure, what is it ?

[Mahesh]

Hi Paul,

Could you please help me to change the referrer manually to  some other with php or javascript ?