Question

I’m attempting to write an iPhone App that automates actions on a certain website. Essentially, there is a ‘clock-in’ feature for employees on a site we use and I’m trying to make it easier. In order to clock-in you have to log into a site and then follow a link and then press a ‘clock-in’ button on the site. I’m attempting to automate this actions with a simple sign in form.

I’m not exactly asking HOW to do it, I’d like to study and learn the processes involved (I’ve never done an automation type program before). I don’t know what this is called and what to Google for exactly. I’ve found a couple things that led me to NSUrlRequest. Am I on the right track? If not, what should I be looking at? Thanks.

Answer 1

This technique is called ‘Screen scraping’, it’s not very nice but does the job. You basically need to make the relevant HTTP request and interpret the HTML that returns.

    NSURL * myURL =  [NSURL URLWithString:myURLString];
    NSString * response = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:myURL encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error: NULL];
    NSLog(@"The response was: %@", response);