unable to get results from jsoup while giving post request

Question

This is the code snippet , it always returns error page

    try {
        String url = "http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/";
        Connection.Response response = Jsoup.connect(url)
                .method(Connection.Method.GET)
                .execute();

        Document responseDocument = response.parse();

        Element eventValidation = responseDocument.select("input[name=__EVENTVALIDATION]").first();
        Element viewState = responseDocument.select("input[name=__VIEWSTATE]").first();
        response = Jsoup.connect(url)
                .data("__VIEWSTATE", viewState.attr("value"))
                .data("__EVENTVALIDATION", eventValidation.attr("value"))
                .data("ctl00_content_placeholder_body_BusinessSearch1_TextBox_NameSearch", "escrow")  // <- search 
                .data("ctl00_content_placeholder_body_BusinessSearch1_RadioButtonList_SearchType", "Corporation Name")
                .data("ctl00_content_placeholder_body_BusinessSearch1_Button_Search", "Search")

                .method(Connection.Method.POST)
                .followRedirects(true)
                .execute();
        Document document = response.parse(); //search results
        System.out.println(document);

    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

I got the request response from net panel of firebug and sent the same. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Depending on your android version, that code will give a "NetworkOnMainThreadExcpetion" if you try to run it directly from a button click or something like that. On honeycomb or later, you have to do network access from a separate explicit thread or a AsyncTask.

From my debugging, you need to add some cookies. That's included below. Also, a couple of your form fields were missing dollar signs, and there were some blank form fields being passed that were empty but the server might expect, so I included those too.

For future reference, I recommend the tool Fiddler to debug issues like this if you're not using it already.

class DownloadFilesTask extends AsyncTask<Void, Integer, Long> {
    protected Long doInBackground(Void... params) {
        long totalSize = 0;

        try {
            String url = "http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/";
            Connection.Response response = Jsoup.connect(url)
                    .method(Connection.Method.GET)
                    .execute();

            Document responseDocument = response.parse();
            Map<String, String> loginCookies = response.cookies();


            Element eventValidation = responseDocument.select("input[name=__EVENTVALIDATION]").first();
            String validationKey = eventValidation.attr("value");

            Element viewState = responseDocument.select("input[name=__VIEWSTATE]").first();
            String viewStateKey = viewState.attr("value");

            response = Jsoup.connect(url)
                    .cookies(loginCookies)
                    .data("__EVENTTARGET", "")
                    .data("__EVENTARGUMENT", "")
                    .data("__LASTFOCUS", "")
                    .data("__VIEWSTATE", viewStateKey)
                    .data("__VIEWSTATEENCRYPTED", "")
                    .data("__EVENTVALIDATION", validationKey)
                    .data("ctl00$content_placeholder_body$BusinessSearch1$TextBox_NameSearch", "aaa")  // <- search
                    .data("ctl00$content_placeholder_body$BusinessSearch1$RadioButtonList_SearchType", "Corporation Name")
                    .data("ctl00$content_placeholder_body$BusinessSearch1$Button_Search", "Search")

                    .method(Connection.Method.POST)
                    .followRedirects(true)
                    .execute();
            Document document = response.parse(); //search results
            System.out.println(document);

        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        return totalSize;
    }

    protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... progress) {
    }

    protected void onPostExecute(Long result) {
    }
}

You would actually execute that code using something like:

TestAsyncTask t = new TestAsyncTask();
t.execute();

To get Page 2, you would have to include the following headers. This is pseudocode, obviously, you'd have to convert it to .data calls:

__EVENTTARGET = ctl00$content_placeholder_body$SearchResults1$GridView_SearchResults_Corp
__EVENTARGUMENT = Page$2

And you still need the other headers ( __VIEWSTATEENCRYPTED blank, __VIEWSTATE as above) and cookies as above.