Web Scraping and field interaction

[wattmhite]

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I'm aware of filemaker being able to pull data from a specific website but is there a way for filmmaker to also input into fields on a specific website and interact with buttons within a script?

Thank You

Matt

[webko]

Short answer - no.

Longer answer - FileMaker can send GET statements to a specified web address, which in some cases will fill out the fields and act as if the Submit button has been pressed.

However, most commercial sites don't allow this and only allow POST statements from the form being physically filled out and the Submit button being manually pressed.

And FileMaker has no way to control another web sites interface like that.

[ggt667]

I do this all the time in FileMaker since 2000 actually; however I only use FileMaker to trigger a script, in 2013 I shared my approach with the world on my blog: http://wethecomputerabusersamongst.blogspot.com/2013/10/execute-php-script-from-filemaker-with.html

The example in the blog is in php from the time of implementing FX.php around the time of FM 5.5; however these scripts can be written in any language swift kitura, apache CGI/php/python, nginx FAST CGI, nodejs express, ruby sinatra, and so on just to mention a few; all those scripting languages can listen to a HTTP GET requests from FileMaker and call any HTTP request sync or async that populates a database.

Captchas may or may not stop you; depending on the page.

Edited December 22, 2016 by ggt667