Click Button in Scrapy-Splash

Question

I am writing a scrapy-splash program and I need to click on the display button on the webpage, as seen in the image below, in order to display the data, for 10th edition, so I can scrape it. I have the code I tried below but it does not work. The information I need is only accessible if I click the display button. UPDATE: Still struggling with this and I have to believe there is a way to do this. I do not want to scrape the JSON because that could be a red flag to site owners.

import scrapy
from ..items import NameItem

class LoginSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "LoginSpider"
    start_urls = ["http://www.starcitygames.com/buylist/"]

    def parse(self, response):

        return scrapy.FormRequest.from_response(
        response,
        formcss='#existing_users form',
        formdata={'ex_usr_email': '[email protected]', 'ex_usr_pass': 'password123'},
        callback=self.after_login
        )


    def after_login(self, response):
        item = NameItem()
        display_button= response.xpath('//a[contains(., "- Display>>")]/@href').get()
        response.follow(display_button, self.parse)
        item["Name"] = response.css("div.bl-result-title::text").get()
        return item

Answer 1

Your code can't work because there is no anchor element and no href attribute. Clicking the button will send an XMLHttpRequest to http://www.starcitygames.com/buylist/search?search-type=category&id=5061 and the data you want is found in the JSON response.

1. To check the request URL and response, open Dev Tools -> Network -> XHR and click Display.
2. In Headers tab you will find the request URL and in Preview or Response tabs you can inspect the JSON.
3. As you can see you'll need a category id to build the request URL. You can find this by parsing the script element found with this XPath //script[contains(., "categories")]
4. Then you can send your request from the spider to http://www.starcitygames.com/buylist/search?search-type=category&id=5061 and get the data you want.

$ curl 'http://www.starcitygames.com/buylist/search?search-type=category&id=5061'
{"ok":true,"search":"10th Edition","results":[[{"id":"46269","name":"Abundance","subtitle":null,"condition":"NM\/M","foil":true,"is_parent":false,"language":"English","price":"20.000","rarity":"Rare","image":"cardscans\/MTG\/10E\/en\/foil\/Abundance.jpg"},{"id":"176986","name":"Abundance","subtitle":null,"condition":"PL","foil":true,"is_parent":false,"language":"English","price":"12.000","rarity":"Rare","image":"cardscans\/MTG\/10E\/en\/foil\/Abundance.jpg"}....

As you can see, you don't even need to log in into the website or Splash.