HTTP POST Request, HTML Form input (login: user/pa

Question

I'm trying to login to a website (http://www.meo.pt/ver/Pages/login.aspx) from within my application so that I can access the program listing, etc, I searched in the page source code for the html for of the username textbox and password textbox input.

<input name="ctl00$SPWebPartManager1$g_cb264700_1517_426f_926d_3ca40934a6fd$ctl00$EditModePanel1$txtUserName"
       type="text" 
       id="ctl00_SPWebPartManager1_g_cb264700_1517_426f_926d_3ca40934a6fd_ctl00_EditModePanel1_txtUserName"
       class="forms_login"  />

I used the value in name and set the content of that key with the username and the same form the password. Then made a POST request to http://www.meo.pt/ver/Pages/login.aspx from which I got a response containing the HTML source of the same page, so login wasn't successful. I don't think the server even considered it a login try.

My question is how should I set the POST request values to make this work? I'm using ASIHTTPRequest for iPhone.

Answer 1

My guess is that it's cookie-related: the page sends a cookie when it appears and requires that cookie along with the username and password. Odds are good that every POST and GET returns a cookie along with the page content, a cookie you'll need to send back.

If you use ASIHTTPRequest to perform the requests and use the same instance of the object to make subsequent requests, it will take care of sending those revised cookies each time. I love this library and recommend it.

http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/

If instead you're using an NSURLConnection and prefer to manage the cookies yourself, the NSHTTPCookie object will help.