Dependence on httplib2

Our current solutions will try to get cookies from Plone site programmaticly!  Or in another word, we need post the login form and collect the cookies by using Python script.  All should happen in backend!

>>> import httplib2
>>> import urllib
>>> http = httplib2.Http('.cache')
>>> login_url = 'http://internal.host.name/plone_site/login_form'
>>> headers = {}
>>> headers['Content-type'] = 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
>>> headers['User-Agent'] = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT)' 
>>> login_form = {}
>>> login_form['__ac_name'] = 'username'
>>> login_form['__ac_password'] = 'password'
>>> login_form['cookies_enabled'] = '1'
>>> login_form['js_enabled'] = '0'
>>> login_form['form.submitted'] = '1'
>>> body = urllib.urlencode(login_form)
>>> res,cont = http.request(login_url, 'POST', headers=headers, body=body)
>>> res['set-cookie']
'__ac="ddeiskdeisljSEI-deisl23_ESL245KD"; Path=/'
>>> import Cookie
>>> cookie = Cookie.SimpleCookie()
>>> cookie.load(res['set-cookie'])
>>> cookie.get('__ac').value
'ddeiskdeisljSEI-deisl23_ESL245KD'

SimpleCookie from Cookie module is used to parse the cookie and extract the value!

The User-Agent is very important for httplib2 to send a cookies enabled request!

References

• httplib2 homepage: http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/