Getting the true URL from an .asp site

[Guest]

The website allows you to search information by date, but it hides the true
POST data for the entire URL. I am trying to write a script that will
download the page each day, but can't find the true URL to do a GET command.
BTW...the data I am trying to get is from a public sheriff's office site,
so there is no copyright or hacking (unless my meager programming skills are
a hack) going on.

Here is the website:

http://www.pcsoweb.com/Inmate/

when you go to that URL it has an option for typing in a date to capture
all of the relevant info from that date. For example: Booking Date:
03/13/2006 will give you all of the date for March 13, 2006. The problem
with writing a script to capture the information based on the date is that
you have to have the URL specific to that particular date.

I.E. http://www.pcsoweb.com/Inmate/&D=Date 03/13/2006. Obviously, that
doesn't work but I was hoping someone may have some insight. BTW...I
tried project URL SNOOPER and only got www.pcsoweb.com/../Inquiry. I know
the date MUST get passed in some fashion, but I can't figure it out.

It appears that the URL involves .asp and is not easy to capture. Any
information appreciated. Thanks...
_______________________________________________

 

[Peter Rilling]

Open the search page and look for the <form> tag which tells you the
location. Next locate all <input ...> elements. Construct a URL with that
goes so that posted URL that includes all the form field values.

Keep in mind that it is possible to code a site so that the querystring
cannot be used to pass values. Don't know how complex their page is.

 

[S. Justin Gengo]

You may be out of luck here...

The site is written in .net and the page is using form postbacks. Normally
you could use a webrequest object to send through the booking date as a
post, but it will be much harder since the site is using .NET.

..NET checks the viewstate of the form and will notice that not all the
controls and other values viewstate uses to check a post's validity are
there so a post you do back to the site will almost certainly fail.

The id of the post item you need to send will be: id="txtBookingDate"

You may still be able to do this, but you'll probably have to use an
httpwebrequest object to get the original page, add the post data to it, and
send back the whole thing to the same url so .net sees it as a postback. But
there are many other things the page may be doing (javascript evals etc.)
That could make your post fail if they aren't mimicked correctly.

An alternative may be to find out if the sherrifs office already does or is
willing to make this information available via a webservice.

Regards,

--
S. Justin Gengo
Web Developer / Programmer

Free code library:
http://www.aboutfortunate.com

"Out of chaos comes order."
Nietzsche