Automate the login process to a website

[Abhi Venu]

Hi,


I have a requirement like this
I need to login to a website and generate a report based on some condition and save it as a file.How can i automate this process of logging and generation of the file.what are the possible ways of doing this.

[Torsten Oppermann]

Hello,

do you really want to do this ? In my opinion this is a high security risk, then again it depends on the Application. Where do you want to save the login data ? On the client side ? In a cookie ?

[Tim Holloway]

On a Linux machine, you can do all that using curl or the "wget" command, and I just wrapped up a project that did a whole lot of that, in fact. On Windows, you'll have to shop around, since Windows out-of-the-box toolset is much smaller. One option is to install cygwin, which will effectively add a Linux environment to your Windows machine.

Another option, that eliminates the security risks that come with keeping a userid/password in a plain text file on the client machine is to set up the server to accept security certificates, generate a cert for the client, and deploy it on the client machine. You'd still use something like wget to make the web request, but the cert wouldn't be in plain text and it would only work on the authorized client machine.