You've set a pretty daunting task for youself, here.

It's pretty easy to determine what fields are on the form, using HTML::Parser, or some of the other CPAN tools. However, are you looking to parse forms where you don't know the expected content? Even a simple form, with a couple of input fields, a few radio buttons, and a couple of drop down boxes will yield thousands of possible combinations.

Will the forms contains any JavaScript to perform on-the-fly input validation? If so, I'm not aware of any Perl modules that will allow you to run JavaScript in the context of a webpage.

I certainly can't see a practical way to run a test for all possible combinations of an unknown webpage. Perhaps if you had a description language of some kind, and coded a template for each page to test against, you could achieve something reasonable.

Testing these kinds of things dynamically are especially difficult. Your best bet may be to write a template that exercises various combinations for each known page, and know that for certain type fields you need to test putting bad e-mail addresses in e-mail fields, letters in phone number fields, etc.

I know these weren't the specific answers you were looking for, but having been involved in automated testing for Windows applications (please, don't everyone start gagging), I know about some of the difficulties.

--Chris

In reply to (jcwren) Re: Parsing CGI form data by jcwren
in thread Parsing CGI form data by Arsenal

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