Question

I need to load 1000 urls on a tracking/reporting app (after authenticating via an HTML form) and trigger a “resubmit” javascript function. Unfortunately there is no bulk action to handle all at once so I’m left with automation. What are my options?

http://domain.com/0001.php
http://domain.com/0002.php
http://domain.com/0003.php
...
http://domain.com/1000.php

Each of the above pages has a resubmit() javascript function triggered by a href. How can I automate triggering these?

Example:

<form action="/resubmit" method="POST">
  <input type="hidden" name="security_token" value="SUPER-LONG-HASH">
  <input type="hidden" name="url" value="http://mysite.com/0001.html">
  <input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="long-string">
  <script type="text/javascript">
    window["resubmit"] = function () {
      document["resubmit"].submit();
      return false;
    }
  </script>
  <a href="javascript:resubmit()" class="resubmit-class">resubmit</a>
</form>

I’m on a Mac. Unix, Perl, Bash, PHP, Automator, FireFox iMarcos are all available.

Answer 1

I already voted up the other answers, but in the end I wound up using straight AppleScript. This was helpful because it used an existing session so I didn’t have to deal with any authentication problems. Thanks for all of your help, everyone. I look forward to becoming familiar with the tools you shared.

set thePath to (path to desktop as Unicode text) & "list_of_urls.txt"
set theFile to (open for access file thePath)
set theContent to (read theFile)
close access theFile

set theURLs to every paragraph of theContent

tell application "Safari"
    repeat with theURL in theURLs
        make new document
        set URL of front document to theURL
        delay 5
        set theScript to "document.getElementsByClassName('resubmit-class')[0].click();"
        do JavaScript theScript in current tab of first window
        do JavaScript "window.resubmit()" in front document
        delay 5
        close front document
    end repeat
end tell