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SOLVED

Download files from company website with pop up login screen

danespoors
8 - Asteroid

Hi,

 

I'm trying to log into my portal on IPSOS Mori, the survey company, to extract response data that they hold there. The set up of their website seems similar to that of sharepoint once you're inside but I have an issue with alteryx connecting to the site to start with.

 

I've been trying to use a text input tool to send a URL into the download tool with my username and password inputted but no such luck. This is far above what I've had to do before with alteryx where all the files have been local, in a server or in a database so some help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Ideally, I'm hoping to log directly into the page that contains the files so that alteryx can just pull everything from there so the URL is quite long. When the link is clicked, I get a pop up login window like so:

 

danespoors_0-1579173241309.png

 

Thanks in advance,


Dane.

6 REPLIES 6
joshuaburkhow
ACE Emeritus
ACE Emeritus

This is probably your best bet for now. Downloading data is the easy part getting past the login part is harder. Try this and let us know if that works for you...

 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Using-Download-Tool-to-get-file-from-s...

 

If it does please mark as solved so others on the community know 😉

 

Thanks

Joshua

Joshua Burkhow - Alteryx Ace | Global Alteryx Architect @PwC | Blogger @ AlterTricks
danespoors
8 - Asteroid

Thanks for the link. I've read through the issue there and it seems similar to mine. Are you able to explain the CURL principle at all please as command line stuff is not my forte?

 

I don't really want to run something where I have no idea how it works.


Thanks,

Dane.

joshuaburkhow
ACE Emeritus
ACE Emeritus

cURL is a very popular and powerful command line tool. Here's a useful description from: https://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html

 

DESCRIPTION
curl is a tool to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the supported protocols (DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP). The command is designed to work without user interaction.

curl offers a busload of useful tricks like proxy support, user authentication, FTP upload, HTTP post, SSL connections, cookies, file transfer resume, Metalink, and more. As you will see below, the number of features will make your head spin!

 

The real part that we are interested in is the fact that we can have it login for us "without user interaction". I would highly recommend spending some time picking up cURL as it has so many useful applications in this area. 

 

Hopefully this helps! 

Joshua

Joshua Burkhow - Alteryx Ace | Global Alteryx Architect @PwC | Blogger @ AlterTricks
afv2688
16 - Nebula
16 - Nebula

Hello @danespoors 

 

curl is a tool to transfer data from or to a server. You can open on windows you cmd and start exploring there. As the link on the previous post from @joshuaburkhow  suggests:

 

curl -c cookies.txt -X POST -F username=<Your_UserName> -F password=<Your_Password> https://<URL of login page> - H "Accept: application/json" --next -X GET https://<URL>/internal/export_Report_EstimatedBilling?format=excel --output text.xls

 

This command would give you the informationn related to the web page in question.

 

Regards

dphipps
6 - Meteoroid

Ok please help!  How do you use cURL to move data using Alteryx?  Do you use the Run Command Tool?  I have an API from a vendor and they are using oauth2.  So I have 2 different URLs, one for the authentication and one which has the data I need. They've given me a user name and password but no token hence I believe I have to generate a new one each time I want to go get the data.   What is the process to get the data?  I know I need to authenticate first right?  And it sounds like that will pass me a one time use token that I need to put into the URL where the data is stored.  I am working with the Text tool and the download tool then I saw this information about use cURL.  Thanks in advance for any help!

danespoors
8 - Asteroid

This sounds like a much harder issue than what I was having. I'd suggest writing a new community post so that other developers will be able to help. As this is an older post with a solution attached, people probably won't look at it anymore.

 

The response time of people to help is really good on here though so make a new post and someone will help you soon after.

 

Sorry I couldn't help with your cURL issue.

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