Thanks, Graham, Martin and Jim for your thoughtful and most helpful
replies. Let me respond to a few of your points.
On Feb 24, 2010, at 2:26 AM, Graham Samuel wrote:
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 <sparkout...@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.
Since I am teaching my students about this topic this year, I am
trying to distill what I am learning on my revolution.byu.edu web
site. I have posted the following inter-linked pages that deal with
GET and POST and Rev:
http://revolution.byu.edu/internet/webServices.php
http://revolution.byu.edu/internet/webServicesTerms.php
http://revolution.byu.edu/internet/getMethodSteps.php
http://revolution.byu.edu/internet/postMethodSteps.php
http://revolution.byu.edu/internet/aboutForms.php
I hope that others may find them informative (and that others won't be
shy about pointing out errors if they find them.)
On Feb 24, 2010, at 2:39 AM, Martin Baxter wrote:
In the url instanced below, unless I'm misunderstanding what you are
trying to do, if you make a properly formed POST direct to
someurl.htm?loadpage, direct from a script or a stack for instance,
the
onSubmit event in the html form is almost certainly irrelevant,
because
it is only triggered in the browser when the user clicks the submit
element, and wouldn't apply in other cases.
Have you experienced some issue that makes you think it is relevant?
< Comments about JS client-side vs. server-side validation clipped.>
Thanks, Martin. That is what I suspected, but being a JS novice, it
was helpful to have it confirmed. I had thought I had carefully parsed
the form tag on the page in question and replicated the required
arguments in my stack. However I still couldn't get the server to
respond with the desired information. As it turns out then, the
validation function was a red herring, and I discovered the problem
after reading Jim Ault's enlightening reply. He gave a very helpful
summary of various types of validation using server-side forms, client-
side JavaScript, and AJAX server-side "live-typing" validation.
But this bit of advice is what helped me find my error:
On Feb 24, 2010, at 3:58 AM, Jim Ault wrote:
server-side FORM
The way I use is to go into FireFox, activate the add-on using menu
Tools:Live HTTP Headers, fill in the form, then capture the headers
that are send by the browser. The headers will include the GET and
POST data (of course). Now you can use Rev to manipulate the Headers
(see the Rev dictionary) before submitting a form.
Once I installed Live HTTP Headers in Firefox, I could clearly see
that I had failed to find some of the required arguments when I first
looked through the form tag in the page source. I went back to the
page source, and sure enough, found some hidden inputs that the page
author had included after the submit input, but before the closing "</
form>" element. Nearly all of the other forms I've looked at have the
submit input as the very last element in the form. So what tripped me
up was a (to me at least) oddly-written form element in the page
source. Thanks, Jim, for the tip on a very helpful tool.
And thanks again everyone for your help.
Regards,
Devin
Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University
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