Pushing A Button on a Webpage

[Matt DeLacey]

Is there a way to have a Java Program go to a webpage, and push a button on that webpage?

With Respect,
Matt

[Sonny Gill]

Never actually done it or study it thoroughly..
but you could investigate using javascript out of a java program to execute the submit method or whatever other button-method on the web-page.
just a thought

[Ilja Preuss]

HttpUnit might give you some guidance...

[Cindy Glass]

Well, if you KNOW where the button is on the screen, then you can use the Robot class to move the mouse to that pixel location and then use the Robot class to press the mouse. Seems sort of "manual" though :roll: .

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Cindy Glass:
Well, if you KNOW where the button is on the screen, then you can use the Robot class to move the mouse to that pixel location and then use the Robot class to press the mouse. Seems sort of "manual" though :roll: .

Wouldn't that apply to Swing instead of HTML?

[Cindy Glass]

Well it is AWT not SWING, but yes. So that means that you would need to bring up the page in a Frame. Any self respecting Browser written in Java can do that . Doesn't sound like a very efficient method - does it?
Seems that there must be a better way.
We use a program called WinRunner to simulate keystrokes in a batch mode. Invoking something like that might work.

[Dave Landers]

If you know what the button does, you can fake it. So do a View Source in your browser and figure out what the button's FORM is doing. Then you could construct a POST request that does the same thing that the button does.
Send that POST using URLConnection. Get back the result, blah blah blah.
Not exactly "Pushing the Button", but has the same effect on the server.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Dave Landers:
If you know what the button does, you can fake it. So do a View Source in your browser and figure out what the button's FORM is doing. Then you could construct a POST request that does the same thing that the button does.
Send that POST using URLConnection. Get back the result, blah blah blah.
Not exactly "Pushing the Button", but has the same effect on the server.

I think, httpUnit does automate some parts of the above. I might be wrong, though - it's a while since I used it...