TechOwl, thanks for the links, let me try to present some more specifics about my situation.
The external site is an internet site which my site has been granted access to. A group of users on site has a shared username and password they use to manually browse the site to search for customer info, kind of like a corporate B2B account a reseller might have to a vendor's site. That site uses ASP .NET 1.1, but I've got no access beyond the browser to this site per an agreement between our company and theirs. I'm trying to build a tool which would basically involve me creating a "wrapper" site on my corporate intranet to convey search queries to the remote site. For example, a site on my intranet might show the various search fields available, the user would input their criteria, and when they submit this, my backend code (maybe running as a WCF service or something on one of the servers on my intranet) would package up and execute a browsing session (crawl?) to the remote site, and retrieve any results of said query. Since the remote site doesn't expose any kind of API or anything that I could query more directly (or less indirectly?!) it seems automating the web browsing process is the next best option, in my limited experience so far at this kind of stuff. Hope this helps further clarify what I'm talking about; if any further details would help ask away, meanwhile I'll definitely check out Fiddler as suggested by yourself and Milo. On Dec 29, 6:53 am, TechOwl <[email protected]> wrote: > Dixie... > > You are being a little too vague and not providing enough information > for us to really help you. I believe what you are wanting to do is > "doable" but we need more detailed information. > > For example, is the external site a .NET site or something else? Such > a distinction is important because if it is a .NET site (for example) > then you have to be concerned with the things like viewstate, etc. > > I have done this recently, and am also doing it now for a current > project, so if you want to share additional details and get help, I > can certainly try to help if you want to e-mail me or something. > > This is not very straight-forward, and it is also not really a > recommended way of developing solutions due to the dependencies > inherent to the approach. > > For starters... > > 1) Get Fiddler & learn some about it:http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/ > 2) Look into the System.Net namespace (if you're dealing with .NET) > :http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.aspx > [specifically HttpWebRequest, WebResponse, as well as > System.IO.StreamReader] > > Hope this helps some!
