Handling an Additional Form

After enabling debugging, crawl your search collection again as discussed in Testing Your Current Configuration, do the following to add an additional form element to the form-handler that you have currently defined in the Form-based Authentication Steps field in your search collection's Form-Based Authentication crawler condition:

1. Analyze the debugging log on the system where Watson Explorer Engine is installed, identifying the first form that it encounters that is not handled by your existing form handler.
   Note: You may also need to insert handlers that enable the form-handler to perform submissions that are normally done by JavaScript. Watson Explorer Engine's form-based authentication support provides two elements to handle different types of submissions:

   • <url-xpath xpath="XPATH"/> - enables your form-handler to emulate clicking on the link that matches XPATH on a page.
   • <url-query-string name="PARAM"/> - enables you to redirect to a page that is the value of the CGI parameter whose name is PARAM.
2. Add a new <form> element to the <form> element in the configuration of your form-based authentication crawler condition. Insert the <form> element before the handler for the previous <form> element that you originally entered:
   • The new <form> element should provide an xpath attribute on the new form element that uniquely identifies the newly identified form that must be handled by the form-based authentication support in Watson Explorer Engine. The most common unique identifier is the ID of the new form, whose xpath would be something like:

     <form xpath="//form[@id='FORM_ID']">

   • Compare the input parameters to that form in the log that you captured in Watson Explorer Engine to those that were present in the initial HTTP transaction log that you captured in your browser. Any that are present in the latter but not in the former must be provide by adding the appropriate <parameter> element with the appropriate name and value attributes.
3. Close the form element, save the updated crawler condition, and retry crawling the associated resource.

If the crawl proceeds past the authentication form, proceed to Restoring a Production Configuration. Otherwise, return to Handling an Additional Form.