HowTo Deal With Cryptic Hidden Values For ASP.net? (__VIEWSTATE)

I was trying to figure out how to deal with the cryptic '__VIEWSTATE' & Cie when you are trying to request (POST) a page with Python. It is the main source of a lot of problems

Solution 1:

How to deal with it? Just think of __VIEWSTATE as opaque data sent to you by the server. It contains some specific data for given page and state of it's objects, and I don't really recommend you to modify it.

If you want to emulate using browser for some ASP.NET application, you need to include those ones in POST request, so the server can reconstruct page's state.

What are exact problem it is causing? I think that your solution is pretty straightforward.

Btw, just on a side note - lot of ASP.NET application contains public API, which can be used instead of trying to parse it's pages.