From: alex fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2003-12-11T07:22:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Testing web application, need assistance ...

Hi

I'm not sure what you mean by handling multi-stage POSTs - do you mean 
ones with data persisting in hidden fields that are sent back and forth 
a few times?

If you're testing web apps, you might find you can use a mix of 
html-tools, http-access2, and rexml to automate stepping through a 
series of pages, including forms. http-access2 (similar to perl's LWP) 
handles the HTTP at a slightly higher level than raw HTTP::Request, 
html-tools parses the pages you get back, and rexml allows you to pick 
out and interact with bits of the page.

At work, I use perl's WWW::Mechanize, to test multi-step form-filling 
(for a CMS), and I wrote something similar for Ruby without too much 
difficulty. You can write test scripts like:

a = HTTP::Automaton.new()
a.fetch('http://something.org')
a.follow_link(/Nice things/) # follow a link with text =~ /Nice things/
a.submit_form('the_form', { 'name' => 'alex } ) # post/get a form

I doubt it'd be hard to implement the handling of meta tags in a similar 
style.

As a bonus, all the packages are on the RAA pure ruby and 
straightforward to install or come with the base install.

cheers
alex

jrb3@eidogen.com wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
>     I'm trying to test a web application using standard Ruby Net::HTTP,
> thought you could help.
> 
>     The application server I'm testing provides a multi-stage reply to a
> POST (not multi-part).  All stages but the last are full pages, with a
> simple META tag forcing a refresh to itself after a short interval; 
> the last stage is the intended full-page reply.  The relevant header
> element is
> ----
> <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1" />
> ----
> 
>     My sense, on reading net/http.rb and the HTTP RFC, is that if I tried
> to repeat the Net::HTTP.post(), this would start a new POST instead of
> getting the next stage.
> 
>     Has anyone successfully dealt with programmatically getting that last
> stage's reply?  As an added bonus, has anyone captured the
> intermediate pages as well for later perusal?
> 
>     Thanks in advance for any insights.
> 
>         Joseph Beckenbach
>         lead XP tester, Eidogen Inc.
>         http://acceptor.tigris.org/
> 
> 
>