web submission automation: simulate onclick event on a title element to load form

Question

A resume-service I use requires that for each listed activity on the resume, there is an hours-per-week field and total hours field. However, the total hours field does not update itself automatically no matter how many weeks pass. My goal is to write a script that does this.

The idea behind the script is: Log in to website -> go to a certain page -> submit a form** on that page updating the total hours

**unfortunately, for the form to open, you need to click an "edit" title element first which causes it to show up. I've taken a look at the html of the webpage but cannot find the form or input tags corresponding to the form I wish to submit, only that the form is generated with what I think is a javascript function call from the element's onclick field. I believe the relevant html snippet is:

<a title="edit" class="edit" href="#entry-type" onclick="editComponent('10227041','education');">Edit</a>

but just in case there is a much larger code snippet later in this post (check the 2nd pastebin link at the bottom)

THE QUESTION: Is there a specific language/library/way (preferably in python, although I can work with Java) to simulate an onclick event and that would result in a form loading?

I've worked on this problem a bit, starting with python's mechanize library. I wrote two functions,

def login(br,url):...
def navigate(br,baseurl,url):...

which would satisfy the first two parts of my script's plan, but the third is where the trouble starts. When I print all the forms on the page using

for form in br.forms():
    print form

I get http://pastebin.com/Gxy2tc1A

The website's html can be found on http://pastebin.com/PySri5cb

Later I tried to work with Selenium (the firefox IDE plugin) and then exporting code into python, where I would edit it to satisfy my specific needs, but that was a no-go either due to some awkward errors.

Answer 1

Have you looked into GreaseMonkey? You should be able to use that to extract the hours per week, do the math and populate the total hours field. You could probably do the entire thing. Anything that can be done on the page in JavaScript could be done within GreaseMonkey.

EDIT: The code for that site is awful. I especially like the inline call to loadResume() that is made BEFORE the element it writes to (#build-wrap).