Some help for a CURL noob please

[jusmeig]

Please move this if I have posted in the wrong place.

 

Im new to using curl. Basically what I want to do is the following in a php page:

 

1. GET a url (I have to visit this url to authenticate myself with the system I am using). Its a jsp page and I can see a sessionid getting set. Do I need to use this in the below?

2. I then need to POST a form with some values to run a search on a DB.

3. I then want to redirect the user to the result of this POST.

 

Here is my code (Stripped down). I'm hoping I am missing something or have something wrong!

 

$url = "url for authentication";

 

$ch = curl_init();    // initialize curl handle

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url); // set url to post to

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);// allow redirects

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); // return into a variable

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 3); // times out after 4s

 

$result = curl_exec($ch); // run the whole process

 

$url = "form post url";

 

// set the target url

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);

 

// howmany parameter to post

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

 

$postdata = "name=value&name=value";

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata);

 

$result = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close ($ch);

print $result;

 

THANK YOU in advance!