Re-submit HTML form including inputs

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi All, I am trying to user LWP::Useragent and HTML::Form to load a form including all the inputs, change a value or two then resubmit the form. My problem is that I am losing the inputs when I resubmit the form. My code is below: Thanks Murray

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Cookies;
use HTTP::Request;
use HTTP::Response;
use HTML::Form;
.
.
.
$response = $ua->request(HTTP::Request->new(GET => "$edit_user_url"));
my $form = HTML::Form->parse($response);
#print $form->dump; # print form values

$form->value("field_2",$mobile); # Change this value

$req = $form->make_request;
#$req = $form->click;
$res = $ua->post($edit_user_url,$req);
print $res->content;
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Re: Re-submit HTML form including inputs by hgolden (Pilgrim) on Sep 11, 2006 at 13:37 UTC
So I've never used HTML::Form, but this question has gone unanswered for a while, so I'll take a crack at it. My apologies if I'm no help. When you say that you're losing the inputs, do you mean that LWP is submitting a blank form, or that it submits the form, but you no longer have the inputs, which you may want to process locally (e.g. to label the response you get from the server)? If it's that you want the form values to persist locally, it's probably easiest to set up a hash which is keyed by the value name. The more likely case is that it's submitting a blank form. Now, I usually do this stuff by capturing a sample post and editing the header directly. In that case, I would use the post method as you do. Is it possible that you should be using one of LWP's three request methods? Check out http://kobesearch.cpan.org/htdocs/libwww-perl/LWP/UserAgent.html and try those out. If that still doesn't work, why don't you private message me, and I'd be happy to take a look at your full code. I have a not-so-busy day at work today, and I bet we can get this working. Hays	[reply]
Re^2: Re-submit HTML form including inputs by muzza1962 (Initiate) on Sep 12, 2006 at 02:35 UTC
Hi Hays, Thanks for the response. I'll clarify my problem a bit. The lines below get a user edit form including the current values in the input fields eg. username, password etc. I can successfully print all the values using the form->dump function. `$response = $ua->request(HTTP::Request->new(GET => "$edit_user_url")); my $form = HTML::Form->parse($response); #print $form->dump; # print form values` [download] I can then get or change any of these values using $form->value("field") or $form->value("field",$newvalue). My problem is that when I do a $form->make_request or $form->click the field values appear not to be submitted. How do I submit the form including all the current values? Murray	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Re-submit HTML form including inputs by hgolden (Pilgrim) on Sep 13, 2006 at 20:30 UTC
So I think the issue is that when you resubmit the form, you're using `post` which will try and generate a HTTP::Request object. The problem is that you already have such an object. Here's an example from http://www.icewalkers.com/Perl/5.8.0/lib/HTML/Form.html: `use HTML::Form; $form = HTML::Form->parse($html, $base_uri); $form->value(query => "Perl"); use LWP; LWP::UserAgent->new->request($form->click);` [download] Both click and make_request return request objects, and you can see that they're using LWP's `request` to send them. I was trying to point you to this in my first post, though I admit that it was pretty unclear. Check out http://kobesearch.cpan.org/htdocs/libwww-perl/LWP/UserAgent.html#ua_gt_request_request. See how `$ua->request` sends a request object? Try that on your `$req` which is such a request object, and let me know if that doesn't work. Hays	[reply] [d/l] [select]