Crawl a page which requires a Windows ID login - Can PHP do this?

ChronicFatigue

I work remotely for a company which uses a Windows ID login to the staff console. I login to check if there are any tasks for me to do.

I want to create a script which logs me in automatically every few minutes and emails me if there is work available. I figure a web crawler script of some description would work, which once logged in checks the tasks page to see if any tasks are available. However before I can get to that stage the script needs to login first.

The 'login with liveid button' on the login page uses javascript to activate the login process.

Is it possible to create a script which logs you in automatically if javascript is being used which requires the user to click on a button?

bradgrafelman

ChronicFatigue;11033351 wrote:
Is it possible to create a script which logs you in automatically if javascript is being used which requires the user to click on a button?

Yes, only because in the end it doesn't matter whether Javascript is or is not being used. It all comes down to what requests the browser makes (and what information it supplies along with those requests).

Then again, the Live ID service's ToS/AUP probably disallows scripted/automated requests anyway.

sneakyimp

bradgrafelman is right that you can get in a lot of trouble for violating a site's terms of service intentionally. It all depends on how much you might jeopardize their business model. Note that criminal charges may apply. I believe the FBI busted a bunch of ticket scalpers that had hacked together some scripts to auto-buy tickets off ticketmaster.

That said, you can set up a script to use curl to fetch the remote pages and configure curl to utilize a file for storage of cookies. Check out [man]curl_setopt[/man] and the options on that page you might be curious about are CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION, CURLOPT_COOKIE, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR. The basic idea is to have subsequent requests to the site all use the same cookie file which is where session ids will get stored.

You'll still have to figure out where the login data gets posted, what the javascript does, how data is returned, etc. It's basically a bit of reverse engineering.