Sending form data to aspx page

Question

There is a need to do a search on the website

    url = r'http://www.cpso.on.ca/docsearch/'

this is an aspx page (I'm beginning this trek as of yesterday, sorry for noob questions)

using BeautifulSoup, I can get the __VIEWSTATE and __EVENTVALIDATION like this:

    viewstate = soup.find('input', {'id' : '__VIEWSTATE'})['value']
    eventval = soup.find('input', {'id' : '__EVENTVALIDATION'})['value']

and the header can be set like this:

    headers = {'HTTP_USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.13) Gecko/2009073022 Firefox/3.0.13',
'HTTP_ACCEPT': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml; q=0.9,*/*; q=0.8',
'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'}

if you go to the webpage, the only values I really want to pass are the first name and last name...

    LN = "smith"
    FN = "a"
    data = {"__VIEWSTATE":viewstate,"__EVENTVALIDATION":ev,
    "ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$MainContentControl1$ctl00$txtLastName":LN, 
    "ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$MainContentControl1$ctl00$txtFirstName":FN}

so putting it all together its like this:

    import urllib
    import urllib2
    import urlparse
    import BeautifulSoup

    url = r'http://www.cpso.on.ca/docsearch/'
    html = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(html)

    viewstate = soup.find('input', {'id' : '__VIEWSTATE'})['value']
    ev = soup.find('input', {'id' : '__EVENTVALIDATION'})['value']
    headers = {'HTTP_USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.13) Gecko/2009073022 Firefox/3.0.13',
        'HTTP_ACCEPT': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml; q=0.9,*/*; q=0.8',
        'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'}

    LN = "smith"
    FN = "a"
    data = {"__VIEWSTATE":viewstate,"__EVENTVALIDATION":ev,
            "ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$MainContentControl1$ctl00$txtLastName":LN, 
            "ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$MainContentControl1$ctl00$txtFirstName":FN}

    data = urllib.urlencode(data)
    request = urllib2.Request(url,data,headers)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    newsoup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(response)
    for i in newsoup:
        print i

The problem is that it doesnt really seem to give me the results... don't know if I need to supply every value for every textbox in the form or what... maybe I'm just not doing it properly. anyways, just hoping someone could set me straight. I thought I had it but i would expect to see a list of doctors and contact info.

any insight is much appreciated, I have used beautifulsoup before, but I think my problem is just sending Request and having the right amount of info in the data part.

Thanks!

Answer 1

took advice from @pguardiario and went the mechanize route... much simpler

    import mechanize

    url = r'http://www.cpso.on.ca/docsearch/'
    request = mechanize.Request(url)
    response = mechanize.urlopen(request)
    forms = mechanize.ParseResponse(response, backwards_compat=False)
    response.close()

    form = forms[0]

    form['ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$MainContentControl1$ctl00$txtLastName']='Smith'
    form['ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$MainContentControl1$ctl00$txtPostalCode']='K1H'

    print mechanize.urlopen(form.click()).read()

I am a long way from finishing, but this is getting me a lot further.