Naive question about interacting with web pages

Graham Samuel livfoss at mac.com
Tue Aug 25 11:39:03 EDT 2009


It's the silly season, so here goes...

Unlike more or less everyone else on this list (I suspect) I am not  
used to mixing Rev and the Internet. I've been looking at the RunRev  
tutorial material about this sort of thing, and some of it I  
understand pretty easily - for example the stack for retrieving  
weather data from the BBC web site. This essentially calculates image  
names on the basis of a convention used by the BBC for the time,  
region or whatever and then downloads them. Fine. Now what about the  
kind of site that invites you to put in some reference (say it's a  
catalogue reference or a post code or some key or other), after which  
you activate some kind of server-side code execution by clicking a  
button, pressing return or whatever; this then generates a result,  
let's say an image of a particular product in the catalogue, which is  
visible via the user's browser; this resultant image is not available  
via a URL until explicitly retrieved or constructed for the user's  
benefit, for example it might be extracted from a database, so the BBC  
Weather example doesn't apply.

Now, what if I want to use a Rev program to simulate the user  
interaction to a site like that - so that my Rev program inserts the  
product code, presses return, waits for the image to be generated, and  
then downloads it (not a screen grab, since the image might have a  
higher resolution than the browser can display)? What I need is a way  
of interacting with the web page(s) involved (or really the underlying  
html), almost by simulating key strokes. I suppose I want to treat the  
html as a kind of API for the facilities of the site.

Is this possible, and is it possible without using an external  
browser? I feel it ought to be, but I just don't know where to start.  
Can anyone explain what kind of route I should follow?

TIA

Graham



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