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Question:

How to Automate the Login to a Web Site (for legitimate use)

Aug 22 '12 at 09:01

I often get this question from customers for legitimate use.

See this Chilkat blog post on the topic: http://www.cknotes.com/?p=349

In summary:

1) You should only be writing an app that authenticates with a web site for cases where the web site owner expects it and allows it.

2) The Chilkat blog post above discusses how there are no set standards for web site authentication. Each site's authentication mechanism, whether it uses Javascript, cookies, the form fields involved, captcha, etc. are entirely designed and developed custom to that particular web site.

3) If the site owner wishes to allow for programs to authenticate, then the process should be publicly documented, or you (the app developer) should be in direct contact with the web site owner to gather the information required to accomplish the task.

4) It is unreasonable to expect Chilkat to reverse-engineer any web site's authentication mechanism. Chilkat will not do it. The meaning of reverse engineer in this case is to examine the HTML source of web pages, javascript, etc. to figure out how authentication is achieved. If you are resorting to reverse engineering to authenticate with a web site, it is not the correct way. The correct way is to get the information directly from the site owner.


Answer

The answer is in the question above..