cURL - Posting to multiple forms on another server

jjfletch

I'm using cURL to post form data to an affiliate's site.

The problem is that the affiliate's forms are twofold. In the first part of their form, an email address is entered, and after pressing submit, another form with a confirmation of the user's email address is displayed (along with more form fields).

We want the user to just enter their email address on our site and then send that data to these other forms, for the following reasons:

(1) We want to capture the user's information for our own database

(2) We want the user to enter their email address only once

(3) We don't want the user to go through a 2-step form

Normally, if it's just one form, I use the following code:

	$url="http://someaffiliateurl.com/affiliateform.php";
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
	curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
	curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "fieldA=".$valueA."&fieldB=".$valueB.");
	curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	$store = curl_exec ($ch);
	$content = curl_exec ($ch); # This returns HTML
	curl_close ($ch);

But, this only posts to one url. I've tried just passing information directly to that second affiliate form, but the second form receives information from the first.

Namely, AffiliateFormA passes a hidden field ("x") with our account id ("12345678") and the email address to AffiliateFormB.

I've tried setting the above $url to

http://affiliatesite.com/AffiliateFormB?x=12345678, but this just redirects to the first form.

Anyone know how I can either:

(1) Post directly to the second form, or
(2) Pass information from the first form to the second form automatically?

Thanks much!

AstroTeg

It would take a little detective work. You'll need to find out if the URL in the 2nd form changes any or if its always static. If its always static, then life is good. Otherwise, you'll have to parse the returned output to find the form and its new url for each time you submit.

Regardless if the URL on the 2nd form is static or not, at this point, lets assume you know the url of the first form and then 2nd form. You've already posted to the first form. From the looks of it, you should have the 2nd form in $content. Worse comes to worse, you may have to parse $content to fish out all the form's hidden data, if there is any. You then need to figure out what post/get data you need to collect to submit the 2nd form. Then its a matter of repeating the code the you did for the first form for the 2nd form (taking into account get/post and url data).

You can tell curl to follow urls and redirects. You may need to enable that option to tell curl to follow the trail to the 2nd form. You may also need to look into sessions and cookies and if the other site even uses them (if not, then life is good, if they do use cookies, then its a few more curl options you need to set).

In short, use your code you have for one form and repeat it a second time (with the necessary modifications) to submit to the 2nd form. If you submit what the 2nd form is looking for, it'll never know the difference between the curl script and an actual user.