CFFundamentals: Mimicking a form submission using CFHTTP

Hey - thanks for the little lesson... i've been trying to do something like this but with a form that requires login... is there something special i have to do to handle that?

+1 thanks

Hi Spame, you don't (typically) want to use CFHTTP to call the search page (if it shows a form). Rather, you want to use CFHTTP to submit your search request to the form's action page (as the form would have done.) That's the point of the blog entry above, though I was focused on a particular challenge that a list member brought up. I see now that I didn't explain that one point about getting the form's ACTION attrubute, as I kind of presumed people reading this had experience with CFHTTP. My bad. Thanks for asking.

So, you want to view the source of the search form page (use "view source" in your browser, as I'd mentioned above). Identify what the form's ACTION attribute is, and you would use that as the URL for the CFHTTP, passing in the form fields with any values to simulate the form passing them in (using cfhttpparam type="FORMFIELD" as I show above). And again if the form ACTION you find passes in any querystring (as shown above with nav=TrackByEmail), then you pass that in cfhttpparam type="URL".

You mention passing in "john doe" (though you seem to have left off the query string variable name for it). If doing that would show the form with that "john doe" value filled in, then again you don't want to CFHTTP to it. You want to view the source of that form to see what URL the form itself calls, and CFHTTP to that.

Now, you show that the result page you'd expect to see would have a URL like http://www.site.com/... I don't think that's the URL you want to use for the CFHTTP. In fact, I'm betting that the form's action page does its lookup (based on what's passed in) and then redirects (does a CFLOCATION) to that page (having found the "id" based on the input search criteria). If that's the case, you still want to do everything I say above, but add REDIRECT="yes" to the CFHTTP, so that CF will follow the redirection from the action page to this results page. I'm just guessing here.

Hopefully it will now make sense.

Spame, as I said earlier, if you request one URL but get back another, then your browser is being told to redirect to another page. In CF, we'd cause that (if we were writing the page doing the redirection) using CFLOCATION.

As I alluded to above, the REDIRECT attribtue of CFLOCATION is the ticket to dealing with issues of redirection in pages you're requesting. Since you just want the URL that it WOULD redirect to, you would use REDIRECT="NO", then inspect the resulting CFHTTP struct to see what it showed. It turns out that in CF 6, 7, and 8 (at least) you will find the page they're redirecting to in the cfhttp.responseheaders structure as a key named location. The following code shows how you could see this. The first cfdump dumps the entire cfhttp struct, and the second shows you the value of the location field specifically. You'd use THAT for whatever it is you're wanting to do.

<cfhttp url="http://www.wowhead.c...?search=Small Barnacled Clam" redirect="No" >

<cfdump var="#cfhttp#">

<cfdump var="#cfhttp.responseheader.location#">

If I've helped you make some money with this, I would point you to my Amazon wish list button located on the right of the screen here. :-)