Making posts to an ASP.NET webform.

[Bernard]

hiya everyone,

I've made this little webcrawler using BeautifulSoup, urllib and
urllib2. I've been encountering ASP.NET Forms recently and I can't seem
to make a proper post to some of them. My post function has been doing
great until this particular website.
Here's some explanations first so that you guys understands my
problem...

Usually there are 8 hidden inputs spread all over the web page:
__EVENTTARGET --> that is the id of the control that is assigned by the
ASP.NET engine. It is usually in this particular form
"dg_Result$_ctl2$linkbtn1" The javascript function DoPostback usually
replaces the '$' for a ':' before doing the real post. Some other
ASP.NET page doesn't.
__EVENTARGUMENT --> nothing's here usually.
__ScrollTop --> its value is often 0
__ScrollLeft --> same as __ScrollTop
__ValidationSummary --> usually empty
__VIEWSTATEENCRYPTED --> an encrypted string. I don't know what it
means nor what it does.
__EVENTVALIDATION --> an encrypted string. I don't know what it means
nor what it does.
__VIEWSTATE --> the encrypted state of the current control. the state
of a datagrid for example.

I extract all those values using regexes on the web page, build a
dictionnary out of all those values and encrypt the whole thing using
urllib.urlencode(). Afterwards I extract the form action and post the
whole thing with cookies enabled. This procedure works like a charm.

The website I've just encounted has only 3 of the 8 hidden inputs.
(EVENTTARGET, EVENTARGUMENT & VIEWSTATE ).
I tried posting the whole thing using only these 3 values & nada.
I then tried posting the whole thing using all empty values for the 5
remaining values...still nothing.

Has anyone tried what I'm doing? and if you tried how have you
succeeded getting the data back after the post action?

thanks for any tips!

cP