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Hi ,
I am planning for a code which will open a webpage and fill the form present in the
web page automatically using data present in a XML file.
Not able to finalize how to start with...?
I just have some basic knowledge of Java, help required on how to start.
Thanks.
Is your project supposed to simulate a user with a browser? It loads an HTML page with a form, fills in the data and presses submit?
You'll need to understand HTTP.
Are you going to use 3rd party packages or write it yourself.
Thanks for the reply,
Entirely about the proj: A unix job after successful run should call a java code, which should open a given web link, that link has a form which should be filed by the data present in a XML file automatically .
The XML file is created by the unix job.
Form filling can be done in background and a reference number will be generated after filling the form need to be captured.
No 3rd party software's are used.
Unix part is done, Java code is pending.
You missed this part of my question:
Is your project supposed to simulate a user with a browser? It loads an HTML page with a form, fills in the data and presses submit?
Yes.
As a part of reducing manual effort.
Do you understand HTTP? You will need to know how it works.
To read the HTML page from a server there are several classes you can use: HttpURLConnection, URLConnection or Socket. Easiest first to more work required by you last.
I'm not sure what classes to use to parse the HTML. I don't think there are any for javascript.
@Norm - parsing HTML
Java's Standard Library has this class:
ParserDelegator (Java Platform SE 7 )
Which can do HTML parsing for you. However, most Java programmers I know tell me steer clear of it and use one of the many 3rd party HTML parsers available: TagSoup, JTidy, NekoHTML Jsoup etc.
And out of those Jsoup seems to be the populist choice at the moment because of it's flexible and easy to use API. You can traverse a document using the standard DOM model or use CSS (JQuery like) selectors.
Hope this helps.