Ankit wrote a nice post about using Java to fill up a form, which is a FCFS allocation (can’t they just *provide* a quantity of good courses?). However, filling up the form can be simply done by a Firefox extension, Autofill forms; but what I would really like to do is be sleeping while the course registration goes on. 😀
Ingredients: Firefox, bash, curl, a bit of common-sense
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First of all, install two Firefox extensions – Web Developer and Firebug.
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Fill up the form that you’re going to fill up. (don’t get lost in recursion here!)
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Follow the screenshot below and convert POST to GET.
- Now open up Firebug console (press F12), select the Net tab, and enable it.
- Now click on Submit:
Ignore the “Registration is currently closed”, look at the console, you’ll have a big url that corresponds to your choices, just copy it.
It will be of the form:
<url>?<data>
- To simulate this form submission, you’ll need this command:
curl <url> -d <data> -k -L
- However, there is a problem, you have to authenticate first. No sweat:
curl https://isas/validate.php -d ‘StUdent=username&searchin=200&password=password&submit=Submit’ -c cookies.txt -k -L
This will save the login cookies in a file named cookies.txt
- So now we finalize the script:
#!/bin/bash
while (( 1 ))
do
curl https://isas/validate.php -d ‘StUdent=username\&searchin=200\&password=pass\&submit=Submit’ -c cookies.txt -k -L \#Change username and pass accordingly
curl https://isas/registration/updateSpecialReg.php -d -k -L -b cookies.txt
sleep 5s \#We don’t wanna hammer the server down 🙂
done
While I sleep on. 🙂
PS0: If you can’t get this to work, read about HTTP 402.