scraping content of ASP.NET based website using scrapy - asp.net

Question

I've been trying to scrape some lists from this website http://www.golf.org.au its an ASP.NET based I did some research and it appears that I must pass some values in a POST request to make the website fetch the data into the tables I did that but still I'm failing any Idea what I'm missing?
Here is my code:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import scrapy
class GolfscraperSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = "golfscraper"
allowed_domains = ["golf.org.au","www.golf.org.au"]
ids = ['3012801330', '3012801331', '3012801332', '3012801333']
start_urls = []
for id in ids:
start_urls.append('http://www.golf.org.au/handicap/%s' %id)
def parse(self, response):
scrapy.FormRequest('http://www.golf.org.au/default.aspx?
s=handicap',
formdata={
'__VIEWSTATE':
response.css('input#__VIEWSTATE::attr(value)').extract_first(),
'ctl11$ddlHistoryInMonths':'48',
'__EVENTTARGET':
'ctl11$ddlHistoryInMonths',
'__EVENTVALIDATION' :
response.css('input#__EVENTVALIDATION::attr(value)').extract_first(),
'gaHandicap' : '6.5',
'golflink_No' : '2012003003',
'__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR' : 'CA0B0334',
},
callback=self.parse_details)
def parse_details(self,response):
for name in response.css('div.rnd-course::text').extract():
yield {'name' : name}

Answer 1

Yes, ASP pages are tricky to scrape. Most probably some little parameter is missing.
Solution for this:
instead of creating the request through scrapy.FormRequest(...) use the scrapy.FormRequest.from_response() method (see code example below). This will capture most or even all of the hidden form data and use it to prepopulate the FormRequest's data.
it seems you forgot to return the request, maybe that's another potential problem too ...
as far as I recall the __VIEWSTATEGENERATOR also will change each time and has to be extracted from the page
If this doesn't work, fire up your Firefox browser with Firebug plugin or Chrome's developer tools, do the request in the browser and then check the full request header and body data against the same data in your request. There will be some difference.
Example code with all my suggestions:
def parse(self, response):
req = scrapy.FormRequest.from_response(response,
formdata={
'__VIEWSTATE': response.css('input#__VIEWSTATE::attr(value)').extract_first(),
'ctl11$ddlHistoryInMonths':'48',
'__EVENTTARGET': 'ctl11$ddlHistoryInMonths',
'__EVENTVALIDATION' : response.css('input#__EVENTVALIDATION::attr(value)').extract_first(),
'gaHandicap' : '6.5',
'golflink_No' : '2012003003',
'__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR' : 'CA0B0334',
},
callback=self.parse_details)
log.info(req.headers)
log.info(req.body)
return req