Posts tagged ‘headers’

Just a quick update on the two avenues I am pursuing to get the new Adobe forums to open up and share their content.

Adobe is going to followup on the email headers with Jive to see what they can implement. Hopefully this will result in getting the References and / or In-Reply-To headers added to the outgoing email notifications soon so email clients can thread them properly. It should be almost trivial to implement that, because judging by the definition of the ForumMessage object each forum message knows its own ID to put in the Message-ID header and also knows its ParentMessageID to put in the References header.

The other avenue is getting access through the webservice APIs. I have been looking at the login sequence of the Adobe site and it looks like the master cookie to determine whether you are logged in is the AUID cookie for the .adobe.com domain. Subsites may add more cookies and eventually maintain state through their own cookies, but if you have the AUID cookie you can get in. So I have reduced the dozens of requests involved in a browser logging in to the forums (many of them image requests) to two requests a client must make. I have included the minimal wget testscript to simulate the login here.

?View Code WINBATCH
REM parameters
SET USERNAME=spam@vandieten.net
SET PASSWORD=sihtyrt
SET RETURNURL=http%3A%2F%2Fforums.adobe.com%2Flogin.jspa
SET LOGINURL="https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?loc=en&e=ca&returnurl=http%3A%2F%2Fforums%2Eadobe%2Ecom%2Flogin%2Ejspa"
SET FORUMURL=http://forums.adobe.com/index.jspa
 
REM remove old cookie and index
del adobe.txt
del forumindex.html
 
REM login
wget -S --no-check-certificate --save-cookies=adobe.txt --post-data "returnURL=%RETURNURL%&up_login=yes&ignore_email_validation=yes&up_username=%USERNAME%&has_pwd=true&up_password=%PASSWORD%" %LOGINURL%
REM get forum index
wget -S --load-cookies=adobe.txt -O forumindex.html "%FORUMURL%"

I need to tweak this a bit to do proper login validation, but it looks like just ignoring all the authentication mechanisms in the API and running these requests instead and then maintaining the collected cookies with all webservice calls will do the trick. Even though the entire login sequence will end up taking close to 15 seconds due to the response times of the Adobe sites, that is progress!