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I am trying to write some UI tests for a web app using WWW::Mechanize. I have however run into a snag while writing tests to handle some edge cases. I am trying to make sure my backend code can handle an enduser messing with radio button values (ie saving the form, changing the radio button values and re-submitting).

While writing these tests I found out that I can not submit a form using WWW::Mechanize with an invalid entry entered into a radio button field. WWW::Mechanize uses the HTML::Form module to handle form parsing/filling/submitting, and that module happens to be very strict about the values you can assign to a field that is a radio button (or a select box for that matter)...

Has anyone run into this before? Is there a clean solution? Did I miss something obvious?

A quick example of what I am trying follows:

use Test::More qw(no_plan);
use Test::HTML::Lint;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $a = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$a->get( $url );
is( $a->status, 200, 'Fetched OK' );
like( $a->content,  qr/Details/,  "Correct page");
html_ok( $a->content, "Details HTML" );

$a->form_name('details');
$a->field( a_radio_button => 'invalid_value' ); # <-- dies here
$a->click();
[download]

The above code will fail and die at the call to $a->field(...). I have tried making calls directly to the HTML::Form object to no avail, but it looks like according to the perldocs for HTML::Form that it is working exactly as advertized. Is there another way to do what I want?

Update:I was silly for not including the error message I got. HTML::Form is doing exactly what is advertized in the docs. It will die with an error message when an bad value is assigned to a radio button or select box. I am looking for another way of doing the same thing (ie using something besides HTML::Form to build a request object, or convincing HTML::Form to accept a bad value...)

The error message HTML::Form spits out is as follows: Illegal value 'invalid_value' for field 'a_radio_button' at /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.2/HTML/Form.pm line 426

- Cees

In reply to HTTP::Form and invalid radio button values by cees

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