Automated Form Filling [Off Topic(ish)]

[paul h]

Hi All,

I need to post data from my rails app to an external web form I do not have any control over. There is no public API, so I was wondering if anyone had had a similar problem, and was it possible to to utilize Selenium in production in order to automate the form filling - similar to tagging a cuke scenario with a @javascript tag in order to automate page interaction.

I will start looking into Selenium this weekend, but was wondering if anyone had any ideas that might point me in one or other direction.

Thanks

Paul Hollyer

 

[Frederick Cheung]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 2:26:45 PM UTC, paul h wrote:

Hi All,

I need to post data from my rails app to an external web form I do not have any control over. There is no public API, so I was wondering if anyone had had a similar problem, and was it possible to to utilize Selenium in production in order to automate the form filling - similar to tagging a cuke scenario with a @javascript tag in order to automate page interaction.

I don't think you want to use selenium - unless you actually want something to be launching browser instances and so on (and then you end up having to install an X server etc. on your production machines)

Have you looked at the mechanize gem? I've used it in the past to fill in forms as part of a  load testing script.

Fred

[paul h]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 4:46:54 PM UTC, Frederick Cheung wrote:

On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 2:26:45 PM UTC, paul h wrote:

Hi All,

I need to post data from my rails app to an external web form I do not have any control over. There is no public API, so I was wondering if anyone had had a similar problem, and was it possible to to utilize Selenium in production in order to automate the form filling - similar to tagging a cuke scenario with a @javascript tag in order to automate page interaction.

I don't think you want to use selenium - unless you actually want something to be launching browser instances and so on (and then you end up having to install an X server etc. on your production machines)

Have you looked at the mechanize gem? I've used it in the past to fill in forms as part of a  load testing script.

Hi Fred,

I will look into the mechanize gem today.

Thank you very much for the pointer.