Brainstorming Session

[ljschrenk]

Hey everyone,

I thought I would just post this to see if anyone had any suggestions, ideas, or thoughts on how I could make this work.

At my job, we have about 50 different accounts, all with different websites. Each account has a section where users enter listings. As a programmer, to test the system, we have to fill out these huge long forms with dummy data just to get through it.

I was wondering if it would be possible to write something that would view the source of a page. From there, find all the input fields and populate them with data (just dummy data).

Is this something that is possible and would be difficult to do?

Thanks for any input.

Lisa

[drawmack]

With the curl functions and strpos you could do this very easily, however the hard part would be determining the type of data to generate just from the html.

What you could do though. Is create an excel spread sheet with dummy data, however many entries you need. Then for each job modify this spread sheet. Make the first row contain the names of the form fields and all subsequent rows contain the data for those columns. On most jobs you'll probably only have to change the header row. Now that you've got this set up export it to csv.

Then in the php script read the file in and use the curl functions to submit your test data to the database by reading the file into an array and looping through it.

One warning, this method will not actually test your form code, you'll have to do a couple the old fashioned way for that.

[ljschrenk]

Sweet! Thanks for your suggestion!

Actually determing the type of data to populate in our system would be pretty easy. Our form fields have 4 characters at then end of each field name that tells us if it's a character or number, if it's a text box, or list, etc...

I was thinking I could open a pipe, read the page, and then use Javascript to populate it.

I'll have to read up on curl functions as I've never heard of them before, thanks for the suggestions!!

Lisa

[drawmack]

CURL is really neat I've been playing around with it for the first time today. Although I don't feel comfortable posting what I wrote because it's a hack for phpbuilder to get a list of people on my buddy list who have a birthday today. However if you look into them and have some more specific questions about them I could probably help out along with many others on this board who have had a lot of experiece with them.

Here are some of the things I did with them today. Remember I only played with them for about 6 hours.

Logged into the boards with my username and password to retrieve the cookies that are sent when you first log in.

Read the main forums page into a variable.

Read the user cp page into a variable.

[ljschrenk]

Alright, here's my first road block.

I'm opening up the php page through a javascript function:

var URL = "www.com/form.php?info=" + info;
var popWin = window.open(URL);

The info variable contains & signs, like this:

info = data1=abc&data2=123&data3=xyz

In the php, when I echo info, it stop at:

data1=abc

I know I've come across this before but can't remember the solution. Any ideas?

Thanks.

[drawmack]

why even bother with javascript?

<?php
//initialize the session
$ch = curl_init('www.com?data1=abc&data2=def');
//output the response
curl_exec($ch);
?>

for control over session behavior see [man]curl_setopt[/man]

[Weedpacket]

Originally posted by ljschrenk
I know I've come across this before but can't remember the solution. Any ideas?

You might have come across it looking at the URL of this page. I'd recommend you use some other delimiter, but whether you do or not you'll need to urlencode your data. But as drawmack has noted, it's a bit redundant, since PHP (with cURL) can do the job itself.

[ljschrenk]

I just thought I'd update everyone that I got this task done last night. Took me fours hours to complete but we should be able to just drop it in any of our accounts. Hopefully it will save all my teammates and myself a lot of time.

I decided not to go with cURL at this time because it's something that I would have had to get our admin to install. I wanted a quick solution that would not create any work for anyone else.

Thanks!

Lisa

[tsinka]

Hi,

you can use the encode function in javascript to urlencode the string, like
var URL = "www.com/form.php?info=" + encode(info);

Thomas

[ljschrenk]

Thanks! That will be good to know for future reference. I was able to end up using the php variable $QUERY_STRING. It worked like a charm.

[tsinka]

Hi,

sorry, but there is an error in my last post ... it is escape and not encode.

Thomas