HowTo deals with mysterious hidden values for ASP Net (__VIEWSTATE)

Question

HowTo deals with mysterious hidden values for ASP Net (__VIEWSTATE)

Hi guys,

I tried to figure out how to deal with the cryptic "__VIEWSTATE" and Cie when you try to request a (POST) page with Python! This is the main source of many problems in my scenarios ... and I understand that when I was looking for answers / solutions, you do not have so many solutions (almost 0!).

In this Section: Unable to load an ASP.NET page using Python urllib2 You can see that I give my solution with a state in analyzing the values of the critical fields every time the page loads ... This works, but it's pretty dumb :-)

    for result in the_page.findAll('input', attrs={'name' : '__VIEWSTATE'}):
        view_state =  result['value']

    for result_1 in the_page.findAll('input', attrs={'name' : '__EVENTVALIDATION'}):
        event_validation =  result_1['value']

    for result_2 in the_page.findAll('input', attrs={'name' : '__PREVIOUSPAGE'}):
        previous_page =  result_2['value']

    for result in the_page.findAll('input', attrs={'name' : '__EVENTTARGET'}):
        event_target =  result['value']

And after:

    url = 'http://bandscore.ielts.org/search.aspx'
    values = {
                            '__EVENTTARGET' : 'gdvSearchResults',
                            '__EVENTARGUMENT' : page,
                        '__VIEWSTATE' : view_state,
                        '__PREVIOUSPAGE' : previous_page,
                        '__EVENTVALIDATION' : event_validation,
                        'DropDownList1'  : Country,
                        #'txtSearchInstitution'  : '',
                        #'hdnSearchText'  : '',
                        #'rdoFilter': '%25',
    }
    user_agent = 'Mozilla/5 (Solaris 10) Gecko'
    headers = { 'User-Agent' : user_agent }
    data = urllib.urlencode(values)
    req = urllib2.Request(url, data, headers)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
    thePage = response.read()
    the_page = soup(thePage)