From 3c5ab1068819a3d4b31070cfe4afba4fa3fbe63f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Pablo Hoffman Date: Mon, 6 Sep 2010 13:17:08 -0300 Subject: [PATCH] Added FAQ entry about __VIEWSTATE parameter --- docs/faq.rst | 10 ++++++++++ 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/faq.rst b/docs/faq.rst index 66cae3d16..c0b76b21f 100644 --- a/docs/faq.rst +++ b/docs/faq.rst @@ -203,3 +203,13 @@ To dump into a XML file:: scrapy crawl myspider --set FEED_URI=items.xml --set FEED_FORMAT=xml For more information see :ref:`topics-feed-exports` + +What's this huge cryptic ``__VIEWSTATE`` parameter used in some forms? +---------------------------------------------------------------------- + +The ``__VIEWSTATE`` parameter is used in sites built with ASP.NET/VB.NET. For +more info on how it works see `this page`_. Also, here's an `example spider`_ +which scrapes one of these sites. + +.. _this page: http://search.cpan.org/~ecarroll/HTML-TreeBuilderX-ASP_NET-0.09/lib/HTML/TreeBuilderX/ASP_NET.pm +.. _example spider: http://github.com/AmbientLighter/rpn-fas/blob/master/fas/spiders/rnp.py