Control Seam based website from Java code

Question

I'm working on a Java application that need's to be able to connect to my University's websites containing my student information. I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing this as the websites framework is Seam which I don't have any experience with.

This is the main link

https://elion.psu.edu/

and after clicking on student this is the link that I actually need to login to.

https://webaccess.psu.edu/?cosign-elionnx.ais.psu.edu&https://elionnx.ais.psu.edu/eLionStudent/secure/elionHome.seam

Does anyone know how to open the second link (student login page) and programmatically enter the username/password, thne 'click' log in?

There's a lot more stuff that needs to be done after the log in but I'm sure I can figure it out if someone could shed a little light on how I should go about doing this.

Thanks,

-Justin

Answer 1

Basically it looks like an application/x-www-form-urlencoded 'POST' to the URL:

https://webaccess.psu.edu/?cosign-elionnx.ais.psu.edu&https://elionnx.ais.psu.edu/eLionStudent/secure/elionHome.seam

It could be reproduced programatically by making an HTTP POST request (ensure to set the Content-Type Header to application/x-www-form-urlencoded) to that address, and posting the encoded form data. Which would look like this if you tried to submit the login 'asd' and password 'sdf':

ref=https%3A%2F%2Felionnx.ais.psu.edu%2FeLionStudent%2Fsecure%2FelionHome.seam&service=cosign-elionnx.ais.psu.edu&required=&login=asd&password=sdf

A good way to figure out this information (If you are using Chrome) is open the developer-tools and go to the network tab. Check the 'preserve-log' box and then try to submit something on the web page. The very first thing in the list for me was the POST request it attempted to login. By clicking on that you can see lots of detailed information about the actual request itself.

Hope this helps!