0

I am now motivated to explore a coding language so that I can make the best solution possible. But I am not sure of the capabilities of all coding langugages, so I am asking for advice.

I want to automate some of the daily processes I do at the office. There is an external database on the internet that we use. We access it with a smart card and secured http.

In short, these are the actions that I do each time I restart the browser or a session ends:

  1. Open a Secured HTTP. /....jsp
  2. After being promted I choose an installed certificate
  3. A smart card is called and I enter a PIN. /charismatics smart security interface/
  4. The page asks me to log in with a username and password.
  5. I open the desired link.
  6. I extract the data from the opened webpage manually.

Is it possible to have all these action automated by code?

THANK YOU FOR ANY SUPPORT

Yavor Tashev
  • 144
  • 1
  • 1
  • 8

1 Answers1

0

If you get a PIN screen from the charismatics smart card security interface instead of from the operating system then it it may be very hard to automate this. Your program is unlikely to get access to the PIN popup Window.

If you get the PIN prompt from a CSP (as you mentioned in the comments) then it may be possible to automate the PIN login. The PIN is normally used to set up the SSL/TLS connection, so having it open in the browser won't help you much, unless you program the browser itself.

If you are bound to CSP's it may be best to keep to C#/.NET. There are of course bindings for other runtimes, but it is better to have as much control as possible.

You may want to take a look at topics such as parsing HTML, because that's something you certainly need to do. Life becomes a lot harder if the web-pages are filled in using JavaScript, so you may check for that first.

Now if you want to manually choose a link you may want to render the page in your own application and handle the download yourself.

This is certainly not a task I would recommend when starting off on an unknown programming language. I would find this a tricky task - there are a lot of ifs left with this description.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Maarten Bodewes
  • 90,524
  • 13
  • 150
  • 263
  • I believe it is from the Charismatics Smart Security Interface CSP, since that is what is written on top. What I must say is that I need to enter the PIN only when I restart the browser, so there is possibly a way to do it only once a day. What language can automate all the other jobs and just prompt the CSS Interface? Thank you for your answer, owlstead! P.S. I can spend a long time researching a language as long as I know it will help, since I might be using it for more than 30 years :D – Yavor Tashev Jul 26 '13 at 07:23