[semi-OT]simulating onSubmit in post

[Graham Samuel]

Hi Devin -

I for one don't think this is OT at all: I have struggled to understand how to extract stuff from web sites in a more complicated way than the simple examples given in the Rev documentation. I got a lot of help from this list (especially from SparkOut <sparkoutyny at gmail.com>) but I still remain profoundly ignorant. For instance, I wanted to know in a similar situation if I could effectively by-pass the JS function while capturing the web-based data and then replicate its functionality within my Rev program. IMHO anything that sheds light on the kind of topic would help strengthen the use of Rev in the area of interacting with web services, so must be of interest to many Revvers.

I hope to see some informative replies soon.

Graham

On Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:11:25 -0700, uDevin Asay <devin_asay at byu.edu> wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> I'm trying to teach myself how to GET and POST submissions to URLs  
> that provide simple web services, like word lookups and the like. I  
> understand the basic concept pretty well and can successfully  
> "harvest" data from various web forms. But I notice that often POST  
> method forms use JavaScript calls to validate data in the forms before  
> submitting it to the server. It might look like this:
> <form method="POST" action="someurl.htm?loadpage" name="formname"  
> onSubmit="return Validate(this);">
> In this case the Validate function is defined in the header and  
> basically returns true if the submit came from the form "formname" AND  
> all of the fields are filled in. It returns false if either of these  
> conditions is not met.
> 
> My question: Is it possible to construct a post command and/or header  
> combination that simulates this onSubmit event returning true? This is  
> basically an academic exercise to help me understand how JS and forms  
> work, and how Rev's GET and POST functionality works; I'm not planning  
> to distribute stacks that do this in any way.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Devin
> 
> 
> Devin Asay
> Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
> Brigham Young University