I’m trying to perform a lookup of a public-facing government web site to find licensing information on certain professionals. (See https://secure.utah.gov/liv/search/index.html )

I can load the page using tesla with its mint adaptor but need to now perform a POST, which appears to read part of the form data using JQuery.

The submit button is:

<input type="submit" value="Search" onclick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Search', 'By Name', 'Free'); setProfessions();">

The setProfessions function is:

function setProfessions() {
  $('input:checkbox:checked.licenseType').each(function () {
    $('<input>').attr('type','hidden').attr('value', $(this).val()).attr('name', 'professions').appendTo('form');
  });
}

(It appears the pageTracker._trackEvent script is part of the Google Analytics on the page.)

The request sent over the wire is:

Request
POST /llv/search/search.html HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Origin: https://secure.utah.gov
Cookie: JSESSIONID=fa808df4bb17cee802c57bb3c7d8; TS01bdb7d2=0143bf517010277adab28f63a21b4b94ccd906dc9560f6e061893b1cde8cf4bb926ae1270d0d55201c82143ef6534344f655d9588c6f4af6af8ce1ded94e9257c77dfbee6c; __utma=128287630.1742368486.1591802595.1591810615.1591816490.4; __utmb=128287630.2.9.1591816594569; __utmc=128287630; __utmz=128287630.1591802595.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); _ga=GA1.2.1742368486.1591802595; _gat_UA-103830962-11=1; _gid=GA1.2.731830168.1591802595; TS01959f26=0143bf5170cddb06b2628645b42b516df797f7f4f171eee6ee7ff0066afb789be3cef48b9fd7318eeff57bb54412d734fe511bd2f2; __utmt=1; TS01959f26_77=08f156120cab2800bcd2801cf30c2b76e6ce0d21176587d514fd5c1bdd2dae547dca300aea61a5577e55dc465a5d1fa90860c69dd38240003ea72082daf55dd9e6126a7c4ea30f412fef20a05a890c3a4819469b6c38866480328690ce775fcfb40e66968958ccc12126549da8133a87eb122ba58bf2eb55; fontsize=90%25
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Host: secure.utah.gov
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.2 Safari/605.1.15
Accept-Language: en-us
Referer: https://secure.utah.gov/llv/search/index.html
Connection: keep-alive

So it appears the button sends a post to a different URL with the selection from the form.

My question is:
Is there a way to synthetically create the form-data and encode it to be able to send the POST method from within my Phoenix application and then get a response back from the site for parsing?

They do not have a public API, so I’m stuck trying this round-about approach.

If there is a better set of tools to meet this need (other than Tesla), I’m happy to hear recommendations.

Thanks,