Is there anything similar to Mechanize for Objective-C? I want to enter info into a search bar, select a link, and then extract some information from the webpage
You can either run JavaScript code in the context of your WebView or interact with its DOM yourself.
You can inject javascript into the page to do what you want with stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString. For example to simulate a click, inject:
getElementById('the_button').click();
Related
Inside my app, I'm using the WKWebView to display a website. My goal is, when user is pressing a button on this website, I want to stop an action linked to this event and replace it with my own, natively made (custom action outside the WKWebView). I've been trying to search for any solution to fetch mentioned event but unsuccessful. What more came to my mind, if there is a way to fetch a JavaScript in WKWebView, I have a possibility to add some JS script code to this site (not to delete the action I want to block). Thank you for any help.
First, do you have a permission to mess with this web site's behaviour? I assume you do, otherwise it is likely illegal.
Second, try using Safari Web Inspector with a device/simulator, and use the DOM tree and console tools to find out what is the HTML/javascript that is involved with this action on this site.
If you can't find what happens in HTML/JS yourself, feel free to post a new separate question on SO with your target URL, some HTML/JS code, and which link/action you want to replace. Tag the question with "javascript" and ask if it is possible to write some javascript to replace that particular action to some custom JS code.
Usually there are 2 types of actions: either it is something that provokes AJAX calls to a server API triggered by an event handler, or it is a plain HTML link that results in a web navigation. For both cases it is possible to write a JS script that overrides the action.
Finally, use WKUserScript to inject javascript into the page, and override the action. Use window.webkit.messageHandlers to send an event from your custom action to the app side. Use WKScriptMessageHandler to process the event in the Objective-C or Swift code.
See an example here: http://nshipster.com/wkwebkit/
Part of the beauty of BrowserID is that it requires very little in the way of infrastructure on your website, you simply embed a button with some javascript and then setup a callback route to handle the post-authentication data. I would like to be able to embed the BrowserID login button at the top of all of my pages inside of the defaultLayout template (and then conditionally show/hide it based on the login state), but I currently see no way to do this. The Auth subsite works by embedding its "login page" inside of the defaultLayout template, but aside from that seems to be a complete blackbox.
I'd really like to be able to avoid either rolling my own handler for BrowserID login or redirecting the user to a completely seperate page that just has a single BrowserID login button on it if at all possible.
Is there a way to accomplish what I'm trying to do that I'm just missing, or is my best bet really to roll my own BrowserID login code?
Looking at the source code for the Yesod.Auth.BrowserId module it looks like I might be able to do something like:
(apLogin authBrowserId) <not sure what would go here>
in order to get the login widget, but hijacking the guts of the plugin like that feels dirty.
You can use createOnClick to generate a Javascript function, and then insert whatever kind of button/link/image on your page. Just attach a click handler and have it call that function.
I'm not even sure what the name of that is to be able to make a search... but I would like to make those kind of things. Facebook has that too with the messages, notifications and friends requests. Thanks
I'm not sure if you expect anyone to give you a complete tutorial with source code included? :) You should probably do some digging around yourself, since a concrete answer on this could mean to write a few pages :)
How can you dig around?
Thé tool for a job like that is Firebug (IMO).
With bigger tasks like these it makes sense to try to split it up in smaller pieces.
Let's say you go for a widget like the user profile popup on SO.
you need some HTML to display in a popup: right click on any html element on the popup and click the 'inspect element' menu item. This brings you to the HTML tab in firebug. This allows you to figure out how the HTML is structured
you need some CSS to style that popup: when you're browsing the html structure, you might already have noticed that on the right side of it is the CSS that is applied to the active element
you might want to use some animation effects: for that you could use jquery. Have a look here to find out more on which effects are available and how they can be triggered. Fading is used in the profile popup on SO.
then you might ask yourself the question where SO get's that html structure from, right? To find out more about which server calls are made you can use the 'NET' tab in Firebug. (When you hover over your user name (only the first time?), then you should notice there's a call made to something like: http://stackoverflow.com/users/profile-link-stats?_=someLongNumberHere
In firebug you can then inspect the request and response. You should notice that the response is some HTML structure. This HTML structure is then inserted into the DOM.
Sooooo you can kinda glue it all together now:
the user hovers over his user name
the hovering triggers a server call (see step 4): use jquery hover to attach a handler to the user link. (subsequent hovers don't trigger that server call, so there needs to be a check to see if that profile popup was already loaded or not)
when the server call successfully returns (see jquery get), the returned html is inserted into the DOM and a fadeIn effect is triggered.
it seems a mouseout is used to fadeOut the popup
I HOPE this is the answer you were looking for. It took me a while ;)
You probably need to check out stackapps
I had a quick question regarding UIWebView. Is there anyway to programmatically navigate the UIWebView? Essentially, I prompt the user for certain information, such as (Current Location, Time). Using this information, I would like to fill out and complete a form on a webpage, and display the resulting UIWebView to the user. Is this possible?
You could use JavaScript to control the UIWebView using the stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString method. For example you should be able to insert text into an input and submit a form:
NSString* script = #"document.getElementById('Name').value = 'Hello'; document.getElementsByTagName('form')[0].submit();";
[self.web stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:script];
You'd have to customize the JavaScript to do whatever you want. For example, you could inject values that you had collected into the script, then run the JavaScript.
You could hide the UIWebView until the new page had loaded, then show it to the user.
Come to think of it, it'd be nice if there were a Selenium type wrapper around the web view, but I don't know of anything like that right now.
Is there anyway by which I can automate the following steps
in Selenium-rc
open a page
click on bookmarklet in browser toolbar
fill up data in the form loaded into the page by said bookmarklet.
If the bookmarklet is not accessible as it is part of the browser/bookmark toolbar,
is there a way in which I can inject the javascript into the page and have it execute?
You are 99% there! You're right, you can't actually click the bookmarklet, but you can inject the same JavaScript in to the page. Simply use the getEval() command to evaluate the JavaScript.