URL Blast redirects

[pmeenan]

(12-01-2010 10:55 AM)endium Wrote:  Does URL Blast follow redirects? I'm trying to figure out why I'm not able to login to my site. It enters the form values correctly, and seems to submit the form, but it reloads the page instead of logging in. The only thing I can think of is that maybe it isn't following redirects, which is how authentication works for my site.

Generally, is there any documentation on how URL Blast works? I'm also interested in any other network/vm conditions that may cause it to behave differently from the real browser?

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I was able to get this to work by clicking on the button "clickAndWait name=Login" instead of submitForm.

I'm still curious about the documentation though.

Technically it's Pagetest that is doing the automation and the docs are a bit weak in the scripting area but if I had to guess I would say that there was some javascript attached to the button click that needed to be executed for the form data to be accepted. It IS a real browser (IE), it's just not a real user driving the events so sometimes there is some trial and error in figuring out what event needs to be sent to what DOM element for the action to work as expected.

It's a lot easier to debug scripts locally using the browser plugin (http://www.webpagetest.org/software/Pagetest_249.msi) - launch IE, tools->AOL Pagetest, File->Run Script

That way you can watch it try to run and experiment with different techniques before submitting it for an online test (where you don't really get any feedback).

Thanks,

-Pat