Crawling LinkedIn while authenticated with Scrapy

Question

So I've read through the Crawling with an authenticated session in Scrapy and I am getting hung up, I am 99% sure that my parse code is correct, I just don't believe the login is redirecting and being successful.

I also am having an issue with the check_login_response() not sure what page it is checking.. Though "Sign Out" would make sense.

====== UPDATED ======

from scrapy.contrib.spiders.init import InitSpider
from scrapy.http import Request, FormRequest
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.sgml import SgmlLinkExtractor
from scrapy.contrib.spiders import Rule

from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector

from linkedpy.items import LinkedPyItem

class LinkedPySpider(InitSpider):
    name = 'LinkedPy'
    allowed_domains = ['linkedin.com']
    login_page = 'https://www.linkedin.com/uas/login'
    start_urls = ["http://www.linkedin.com/csearch/results?type=companies&keywords=&pplSearchOrigin=GLHD&pageKey=member-home&search=Search#facets=pplSearchOrigin%3DFCTD%26keywords%3D%26search%3DSubmit%26facet_CS%3DC%26facet_I%3D80%26openFacets%3DJO%252CN%252CCS%252CNFR%252CF%252CCCR%252CI"]

    def init_request(self):
        #"""This function is called before crawling starts."""
        return Request(url=self.login_page, callback=self.login)

    def login(self, response):
        #"""Generate a login request."""
        return FormRequest.from_response(response,
                    formdata={'session_key': '[e-mail]', 'session_password': 'somepassword'},
                    callback=self.check_login_response)

    def check_login_response(self, response):
        #"""Check the response returned by a login request to see if we aresuccessfully logged in."""
        if "Sign Out" in response.body:
            self.log("\n\n\nSuccessfully logged in. Let's start crawling!\n\n\n")
            # Now the crawling can begin..

            return self.initialized() # ****THIS LINE FIXED THE LAST PROBLEM*****

        else:
            self.log("\n\n\nFailed, Bad times :(\n\n\n")
            # Something went wrong, we couldn't log in, so nothing happens.

    def parse(self, response):
        self.log("\n\n\n We got data! \n\n\n")
        hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        sites = hxs.select('//ol[@id=\'result-set\']/li')
        items = []
        for site in sites:
            item = LinkedPyItem()
            item['title'] = site.select('h2/a/text()').extract()
            item['link'] = site.select('h2/a/@href').extract()
            items.append(item)
        return items

The issue was resolved by adding 'Return' in front of self.initialized()

Thanks Again! -Mark

Answer 1

class LinkedPySpider(BaseSpider):

should be:

class LinkedPySpider(InitSpider):

Also you shouldn't override the parse function as I mentioned in my answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5857202/crawling-with-an-authenticated-session-in-scrapy

If you don't understand how to define the rules for extracting links, just have a proper read through the documentation:
http://readthedocs.org/docs/scrapy/en/latest/topics/spiders.html#scrapy.contrib.spiders.Rule
http://readthedocs.org/docs/scrapy/en/latest/topics/link-extractors.html#topics-link-extractors