So, I've been writing a http client designed to simulate a session with one of my company's products. The crucial thing we need from this program is a cookie jar. When I began I was doing exploratory code to figure things out about http. I managed to make a cookie jar with my toy code, along with the intermediate steps needed to generate the cookies that represent a session. Then it was time to integrate my experimental toy code into something closer to what production code should look like. This is where bizarro behavior starts to happen. All the intermediate steps appear to be working, as later steps are dependent on earlier steps succeeding. Yet in the end, no cookie jar. We did an strace on the binary and it appears that there seems to be a problem with the reading/writing of the file to be the cookie jar, and we don't know why. The kludge solution is to write a wrapper that calls the program in such a way that I can capture standard error and parse out the cookies. I would hate for things to remain this way. It disturbs me. So, my toy code can create a cookie jar. But what will one day be production code does everything correctly except produce the cookie jar. Included is the entire program, standard error, and strace output. Also, my toy program which succeeds in producing a cookie jar. If anyone wants to take a stab at this that would be peachy. I'm looking for avenues to explore and good questions to ask, as I am out of both. P.S. Thanks to everyone who got me this far. If this is what we end up having to use, it does get the job done. I'm just trying to get rid of my kludge work-around.

{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-} module Main where

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Imports ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

import Control.Monad import Control.Monad.Error import Network.Curl import System.Environment (getArgs) import HtmlParsing import SessionCreator

main :: IO () main = do curl <- initCurl user:pass:_ <- getArgs resp <- generateResourceHtml curl user pass

case resp of Left err -> print err Right body -> obtainCookies curl body

{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-} module SessionCreator ( initCurl, curlResp, urlBase, urlInitial, urlLogin, urlLogOut, urlFlash1, urlFlash2, urlLaunch, urlLaunchTest, urlQuickCreate, urlGetResource, urlShowWebForwards, respBody, -- login resourceOpts, loginOpts ) where

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Imports ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --import qualified Data.ByteString as B

import Network.Curl import Control.Monad import Control.Monad.Error

initCurl :: IO Curl initCurl = do curl <- initialize setopts curl curlOpts return curl

curlOpts :: [CurlOption] curlOpts = [ CurlCookieSession True , CurlCookieJar "cookies.txt" , CurlCookieFile "cookies2.txt" , CurlFollowLocation True , CurlUserAgent "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)" , CurlVerbose True , CurlHeader True , CurlAutoReferer True , CurlFailOnError True ]

--- loginOpts looks like this for now loginOpts :: String -> String -> [CurlOption] loginOpts user pass = [ CurlFailOnError True , CurlPost True , CurlNoBody False , CurlPostFields [ "_charset_=UTF-8" , "javaScript=true" , "username=" ++ user , "password=" ++ pass ] ]

resourceOpts :: [CurlOption] resourceOpts = [ CurlHttpHeaders [ "Accept: text/javascript, text/html, application/xml, text/xml, */*" , "Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5" , "Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7" , "Keep-Alive: 115" , "Connection: keep-alive" , "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" , "X-Prototype-Version: 1.6.0.3" ] , CurlEncoding "gzip,deflate" ]

curlResp :: (Error e, MonadError e m, MonadIO m) => Curl -> URLString -> [CurlOption] -> m String --CurlResponse curlResp curl url opts = do resp <- liftIO $ (do_curl_ curl url opts :: IO CurlResponse) let code = respCurlCode resp status = respStatus resp if code /= CurlOK || status /= 200 then throwError $ strMsg $ "Error: " ++ show code ++ " -- " ++ show status else return $ respBody resp

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ URLs ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(//) :: String -> String -> String a // b = a ++ "/" ++ b

urlBase :: URLString urlBase = "https://172.16.1.18"

urlInitial = urlBase // "showLogon.do" urlLogin = urlBase // "default/showLogon.do" urlFlash1 = urlBase // "showFlashCheck.do" urlFlash2 = urlBase // "logon.do?flashVersion=10.1.102" urlShowWebForwards = urlBase // "showWebForwards.do" urlGetResource = urlBase // "resourceList.do?form=webForwardsForm&readOnly=false&policyLaunching=true&resourcePrefix=webForwards&path=%2FshowWebForwards.do&messageResourcesKey=webForwards&actionPath=%2FresourceList.do"

urlCreateWebForward = urlBase // "quickCreateWebForward.do?actionTarget=create&actionPath=%2FquickCreateWebForward.do%3FactionTarget%3Dcreate&quickCreate=true&evalJS=true&evalScripts=true"

urlLogOut = urlBase // "logoff.do"

urlQuickCreate = urlBase // "quickCreateWebForward.do?actionTarget=create&actionPath=%2FquickCreateWebForward.do%3FactionTarget%3Dcreate&quickCreate=true&evalJS=true&evalScripts=true"

module HtmlParsing ( obtainCookies ,generateResourceHtml ) where

import Text.HTML.TagSoup import Data.List.Split import Data.List import Data.Maybe import Numeric import Network.Curl import Control.Monad import Control.Monad.Error import SessionCreator

processHTML :: String -> [[String]] processHTML htmlFILE = let parsedHTML = parseTags htmlFILE allTagOpens = sections (~== TagOpen "a" [("href","")]) parsedHTML taggedTEXT = head $ map (filter isTagOpen) allTagOpens allHREFS = map (fromAttrib "href") taggedTEXT allPotentials = map (dropWhile (/= '?')) allHREFS removedNulls = filter (not . null) allPotentials removedQs = map (drop 1) removedNulls in map (splitOn "&") removedQs

createIDList :: [[String]] -> [String] createIDList strungPairs = let nvList = map (map (splitOn "=")) strungPairs nvTuple = map (map (list2Tuple)) nvList netofResources = map (lookup "resourceId") nvTuple removedNothings = catMaybes netofResources sortedIds = (map head . group . sort) $ map (\x -> read x :: Int) removedNothings in map ("ResourceId" %%) $ map show sortedIds

list2Tuple :: [a] -> (a,a) list2Tuple [x,y] = (x,y)

(%%) :: String -> String -> String a %% b = a ++ "=" ++ b

generateResourceHtml :: Curl -> String -> String -> IO (Either String String) generateResourceHtml curl user pass = do let makeIDPage = do curlResp curl urlInitial method_GET curlResp curl urlLogin $ loginOpts user pass curlResp curl urlFlash1 resourceOpts curlResp curl urlFlash2 resourceOpts curlResp curl urlShowWebForwards resourceOpts curlResp curl urlQuickCreate resourceOpts curlResp curl urlGetResource resourceOpts runErrorT makeIDPage

obtainCookies :: Curl -> String -> IO () obtainCookies curl responseBody = do mapM_ (flip (curlResp curl) resourceOpts) $ screenScraping responseBody

screenScraping :: String -> [String] screenScraping responseBody = let collectedStrings = processHTML responseBody collectedIDLists = createIDList collectedStrings in constructedResourceURIs urlBase collectedIDLists

constructedResourceURIs :: String -> [String] -> [String] constructedResourceURIs url resourceIDs = let frontURI = url ++ "/launchWebForward.do?" midURI = map (frontURI ++) resourceIDs in map (++ "&policy=0&returnTo=%2FshowWebForwards.do") midURI

Here is the toy (produces a cookiejar) program. Attached are all the output files {-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-} module Main where ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Imports ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ import Control.Monad import Control.Monad.Error import Network.Curl import System.Environment (getArgs) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Curl ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ initCurl :: IO Curl initCurl = do curl <- initialize setopts curl curlOpts return curl curlOpts :: [CurlOption] curlOpts = [ CurlCookieSession True , CurlCookieJar "cookies.txt" , CurlCookieFile "cookies.txt" , CurlFollowLocation True , CurlUserAgent "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)" , CurlVerbose True ] loginOpts :: String -> String -> [CurlOption] loginOpts user pass = [ CurlFailOnError True , CurlPost True , CurlNoBody False , CurlPostFields [ "_charset_=UTF-8" , "javaScript=true" , "username=" ++ user , "password=" ++ pass ] ] curlResp :: (MonadError String m, MonadIO m) => Curl -> URLString -> [CurlOption] -> m String --CurlResponse curlResp curl url opts = do resp <- liftIO $ (do_curl_ curl url opts :: IO CurlResponse) let code = respCurlCode resp status = respStatus resp if code /= CurlOK || status /= 200 then throwError $ "Error: " ++ show code ++ " -- " ++ show status else return $ respBody resp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- URLs ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (//) :: String -> String -> String a // b = a ++ "/" ++ b urlBase :: URLString urlBase = "https://172.16.1.18" urlInitial = urlBase // "showLogon.do" urlLogin = urlBase // "default/showLogon.do" urlFlash1 = urlBase // "showFlashCheck.do" urlFlash2 = urlBase // "logon.do?flashVersion=9.0.100" urlLaunch = urlBase // "launchWebForward.do?resourceId=4&policy=0&returnTo=%2FshowWebForwards.do" urlLaunchTest = urlBase // "launchWebForward.do?resourceId=5&policy=0&returnTo=%2FshowWebForwards.do" curlResp :: (MonadError String m, MonadIO m) => Curl -> URLString -> [CurlOption] -> m String --CurlResponse curlResp curl url opts = do resp <- liftIO $ (do_curl_ curl url opts :: IO CurlResponse) let code = respCurlCode resp status = respStatus resp if code /= CurlOK || status /= 200 then throwError $ "Error: " ++ show code ++ " -- " ++ show status else return $ respBody resp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- URLs ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (//) :: String -> String -> String a // b = a ++ "/" ++ b urlBase :: URLString urlBase = "https://172.16.1.18" urlInitial = urlBase // "showLogon.do" urlLogin = urlBase // "default/showLogon.do" urlFlash1 = urlBase // "showFlashCheck.do" urlFlash2 = urlBase // "logon.do?flashVersion=9.0.100" urlLaunch = urlBase // "launchWebForward.do?resourceId=4&policy=0&returnTo=%2FshowWebForwards.do" urlLaunchTest = urlBase // "launchWebForward.do?resourceId=5&policy=0&returnTo=%2FshowWebForwards.do" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- IO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ launch :: String -> String -> IO (Either String String) launch user pass = do -- Initialize Curl curl <- initCurl -- Sequence of steps let steps = do curlResp curl urlInitial method_GET curlResp curl urlLogin $ loginOpts user pass curlResp curl urlFlash1 method_GET curlResp curl urlFlash2 method_GET curlResp curl urlLaunch method_GET -- curlResp curl urlLaunchTest method_GET -- You'd use this to catch the exception right away -- `catchError` \e-> ... runErrorT steps main :: IO () main = do -- username and password user:pass:_ <- getArgs -- Launch webpage resp <- launch user pass -- Response comes as Either String String -- You have to handle each case case resp of Left err -> print err Right body -> putStrLn body So to sum up again, I'm trying to figure out why the toy program generates a cookie jar and the other program does everything it should *except* produce a cookie jar. Thanks to anyone who wants to slog through this.