Feature Request : Adding method submit_form to mojo::useragent

[b03cmans]

Feature Request : Adding method submit_form to Mojo::UserAgent

like this method on https://metacpan.org/pod/WWW::Mechanize#$mech-%3Esubmit_form(-...-) on WWW::Mechanize

which let you select a form from the previously fetched page, fill in its fields, and submit it. It combines the form_number/form_name/form_id, set_fields/with_fields and click methods into one higher level call .

[kraih]

Unfortunately that can't work, since Mojo::UserAgent does not contain request state. Only the returned transaction object does.

[b03cmans]

I see , is it possible to add such method to Mojo::Message::Response (or better to Mojo::DOM) to parse the result and return a new request object which can be again used by Mojo::UserAgent ?

[kraih]

Yes, that's more possible. On the Mojo::DOM layer you would teach Mojo::DOM::val to extract full forms (or add a new related method). And then probably add a method to Mojo::Transaction::HTTP that uses it to create a followup transaction.

[kraih]

We've been trying to do the Mojo::DOM part in the past, but never found a good enough solution.

[Tekki]

Would be great if we could replace LWP::UserAgent + HTML::Form with this.

[Tekki]

@b03cmans + @kiwiroy, what do you think of that?

$dom->form('#form1')->val(%newvalues)->submit($ua, '#button1');

or

$form = FormClass->new($dom->at('#form1'))->val(%newvalues);
$ua->build_tx($form->submit('#button1'));

[b03cmans]

@Tekki

both looks good , supposing FormClass is repesenting the HTML Form elements something like HTML::Form ,it will be very nice .

[kiwiroy]

I'd imagined

# Mojo::DOM::HTML::decode_form
$ua->build_tx(decode_form $dom->at('form'), $newvalues, '#button1');

[Tekki]

The closer I look at it the more complicated it gets. First I wanted to propose an independent module. But this will not work. Just an example: We can't create the parameters for build_tx from a DOM because it doesn't contain the request URL. If we have a FormClass module it should be built like this:

$form = $ua->get($url)->result->form('#form1');

Similar to ->result->json. As it was mentioned at the beginning of this discussion (and we probably didn't notice), FormClass should contain the DOM plus transaction information.

[kraih]

I mentioned it on IRC before, but i guess it's worth mentioning here too. Mojo::DOM::val once had form support, but we were not happy enough with it and so it got removed again https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo/commit/861193d93e4d83b624a91c87987254f5aeda3a6e.

Perhaps this feature should exist as two methods, Mojo::DOM::val to extract the form values, and a separate new function to get the method and URL of a form.

my $form = $dom->at('form');
my ($method, $url) = $form->target;
my $pairs = $form->val('#submit-button');

Of course you need context to create a transaction from that, but that could happen on a layer that has all that information.

my $form_tx = $ua->get('http://127.0.0.1:3000/form');
my $followup_tx = $tx->submit('#submit-button');
my $final_tx = $ua->start($followup_tx);

Just thinking out loud. 😁

[kraih]

I think with #1387 @kiwiroy might have proven that this feature is too big for core Mojolicious. It should probably be a separate CPAN module, maybe one or more roles.

[Tekki]

@kiwiroy you already started to work at such a module?

[kiwiroy]

@Tekki mostly translated over, will upload to CPAN later.

[Tekki]

@kiwiroy Is there a public repo for this code?

[kiwiroy]

@Tekki should all be public now.

[kiwiroy]

See Mojo::Transaction::HTTP::Role::Mechanize for the released role on CPAN.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[kraih]

Too big for core Mojolicious and already a CPAN module.