Question

I have a Ruby program that parses HTML data generated by an asp.net page at a government site over which I have no control. I currently submit a query at the asp.net page by going to the page and clicking “submit”, then saving the results (which is the file that the Ruby program parses). Is there any way to trigger the submit from within my Ruby program, so I don’t have to manually do that every time?

In case it’s useful, this is the address I go to and click “submit” and then save:

http://www.deq.state.or.us/wq/sisdata/facilitycriteria.asp

Actually, before saving I click “Show All Records” at the results page (http://www.deq.state.or.us/wq/sisdata/facilitylist.asp), so I’d need to figure out how to trigger that from within my program as well, but I figure if there’s a way to to the “submit” then there’s probably a similar way to do the “Show All Records.”

Thanks.

Answer 1

You could use watir:

require 'watir'
browser = Watir::Browser.new
browser.goto('http://www.deq.state.or.us/wq/sisdata/facilitycriteria.asp')
browser.button(:name, 'submit button name').click
puts browser.html  # <- This should display the HTML of the page