Can I fill out a web form automatically?

Hello! I’m trying to automate the process of lunch orders for my company. We use discord, so my thought was to have Make detect when I receive a lunch mail, then use a discord bot to post that weeks dishes and allow people to use emoji reactions to highlight which dishes they want.

I then want to gather the emoji reactions and use them to automatically fill and the lunch order web form. The issue I have is that the web form system used does not have a native module in Make. Is there any other way I could do this?

I’m unsure whether the form has security measures to reject web request that aren’t from the site itself, but if it doesn’t then is that potentially something I could do?

Hi Marius

Welcome to the community. There are a lot of things happening in your post - my advice would be to break it down into several individual items, work on them while you build experience then when everything is working properly, combine them into a super amazing scenario! If you make it too complex to start with you will get overwhelmed.

The best way of passing forms info to make is via webhook. If your forms component allows you to post a webhook set up a webhook in your scenario and add the webhook address to your webform submission settings. This is a very powerful solution… as long as your form component will allow you use webhooks. If you need help, just shout.

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I appreciate the advice, but I’m in no danger of being overwhelmed! I’m an experienced developer, and I’ve already made the bot and set up a functional automation between my email and the discord bot. There’s only one part left until the whole system is automated the way I envisioned it! :slight_smile:

On that note, I think you misunderstood my problem. I’m not trying to pass forms data into make, I’m trying to pass data from make and into a form! I also have no access to the service that provides the forms, so there’s no way for me to set up any webhook settings within a form component. In other words a webhook will not work in this scenario.

So my question is: Can Make fill in a random web form and press the submit button for me? Or can it alternatively send HTTP requests?

Can you look at the html for the web form and reverse engineer a HTTP post scenario? One of the hurdles will be to see if the form allows posts from Make’s IP addresses.

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ah. No probs. We always assume folk don’t know just so we don’t confuse.

Fill out a form - yes as long as their form supports that functionality. Press submit - no.

I presume from your post that you are submitting the form (the lunch order) to an external organisation? What happens to that form when it is submitted - does it go into a system. If so does that system have an API? If yes can you access it? If so - submit a HTTP request and bypass the form. Perhaps they simply receive an email? In which case bypass the form and have make submit the email directly to them.

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Can you look at the html for the web form and reverse engineer a HTTP post scenario? One of the hurdles will be to see if the form allows posts from Make’s IP addresses.

yeah, this is a good idea

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I presume from your post that you are submitting the form (the lunch order) to an external organisation? What happens to that form when it is submitted - does it go into a system. If so does that system have an API? If yes can you access it? If so - submit a HTTP request and bypass the form. Perhaps they simply receive an email? In which case bypass the form and have make submit the email directly to them.

Yes, you presume correctly! I’ve contacted the proivder of the form to try to figure out those kinds of things, but so far there hasn’t been any response. I was hoping for maybe some API access, but I hadn’t thought about the possibility that the form might just send an e-mail. If that’s the case then this would be solved quite easily, so I’ll definitely look into that!

Can you look at the html for the web form and reverse engineer a HTTP post scenario? One of the hurdles will be to see if the form allows posts from Make’s IP addresses.

If all else failed, this is what I was hoping to do! They’re using an established provider though, so I’m trying to not be too hopeful that they will allow a custom post from Make or my discord bot.

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Wouldn’t a visual webbrowser interface on make.com be awesome with possibility to let it perform mouseclicks on that webpage and fill web forms?

I am trying to fill a form with customer contact data on a platform which has no api (yet).
As IainM stated, there is no possibility to let make press a “submit” button.