Introduction
All of the options that appear on the Forms tab on the Pro desktop tool are described below.
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Forms tab |
This tab allows you to look for a matching form on your website and submit this form, together with any values you wish to send, to your web server. This allows you to validate the response from your server. Typically this is used to log into a site to validate restricted pages.
For more information on using login forms see the Login forms page.
Action URL
When the tool is validating the site it will look for a form with an 'action' attribute which matches the value entered here. If it finds a match it will submit the form to the server using the options on the rest of this tab.
Note that every form that matches will be submitted (i.e. there can be more than one). Also the 'method' attribute of the form is used to decide whether the tool will use a GET or POST to submit the form.
The Action URL is normally an exact match for the 'action' attribute, but you can use the 'Regular expression' checkbox to specify that the Action URL is a regular expression instead. This may allow you to more easily match the required form.
Submit button
Many forms have more than one 'submit' button. For example one button may be used to send the form details, and another to reset them.
Here you can enter the name of the button you wish to send with the form. If a matching button is found with the same 'name' attribute, then the value of this button will be submitted with the form, and any other submit buttons ignored. If a match cannot be found then no submit buttons will be sent. Finally, if you do not enter anything in this field, then the values of all the submit buttons on the form will be sent.
Parameters
When the form is submitted the default values of any form controls (checkboxes, menus, text boxes, hidden controls, etc.) will be sent to the server just like a normal browser would do.
Normally, you will want to override some of these values with your own, such as a userid or password value, or add some extra parameters using the table provided.
Double-click on the Name or Value to enter the parameter details. You can add extra lines or delete the currently selected one using the Add and Delete buttons at the bottom. When you've finished editing the text make sure that you click outside the table cell to finish, or your changes may not be saved.
Note that any parameter with a blank value will be ignored, and you may enter more than one parameter with the same name (this is a valid thing to do). Also, all parameters will be submitted using "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" encoding, no matter what encoding is specified on the form.