HTML Form GET or POST

To use the HTML Form GET or POST credential, supply a domain, http-method, login-uri, and form-items.

Before a URI is scheduled for crawling, Heritrix looks for preconditions.  Examples of preconditions include capturing the DNS record of the server that hosts the URI and fetching the robots.txt file.  The HTML Form credentials are also processed as a precondition.  If there are HTML Form credentials for a particular CrawlServer in the Credential Store, the URI specified in the HTML Form credential login-uri field is scheduled as a precondition for the site, after the DNS and robots.txt preconditions.

domain

See RFC2617 (BASIC AND DIGEST Auth) domain.

login-uri

The login-uri is a relative or absolute URI to which the HTML Form submits.  It is not necessarily the page that contains the HTML Form; rather it is the ACTION URI the to which the form submits.

form-items

Form-items are a listing of HTML Form key/value pairs. The submit button usually must be included in the form-items.

An HTML Form GET or POST credential configuration is illustrated below. (Note that this bean must appear in the CredentialStore's 'credentials' map, either via a bean-reference, or by being defined inline there.)

<bean id="credential"
   class="org.archive.modules.credential.HtmlFormCredential">

    <property name="domain" value="example.com" />

    <property name="loginUri" value="http://example.com/login"/>

    <property name="formItems">
        <map>
            <entry key="login" value="mylogin"/>
            <entry key="password" value="mypassword"/>
            <entry key="submit" value="submit"/>
        </map>
    </property>
</bean>

Note

• For a site with an HTML Form credential, a login is performed against all listed HTML Form credential login-uris after the DNS and robots.txt preconditions are fulfilled.  The crawler will only view sites that have HTML Form credentials from a logged-in perspective.  There is no current way for a single Heritrix job to crawl a site in an unauthenticated state and then re-crawl the site in an authenticated state. (You would have to do this in two separately-configured job launches.)
• The form login is only run once.  Heritrix continues crawling regardless of whether the login succeeds. There is no way of telling Heritrix to retry authentication if the first attempt is not successful.  Neither is there a means for the crawler to report success or failed authentications.  The crawl operator should examine the logs to determine whether authentication succeeded.
• Some sites' login forms may have form items with dynamic names, or necessary extra hidden fields whose required value changes for each visitor. This HtmlFormCredential mechanism has no support for successfully submitting such forms.