Replicating a Post action from a HTTP header - html

Question

I am trying to send a remote post action to a website to change from one state to another automatically at specific intervals, however, I am unable to decipher the HTTP header information to get the desired result. Every time I send a post the website doesn't accept it, so obviously I have parsed the post incorrectly.
The working HTTP Header information I have captured is as follows:
http://URLXXX.com/p/9998812/update_availability
POST /p/9998812/update_availability HTTP/1.1
Host: URLXXX.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:39.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/39.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1
Referer: http://URLXXX.com/p/9998812/s/fwkA-irHT-2kMfS
Cookie:
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 138
utf8=%E2%9C%93&_method=put&authenticity_token=xMiaIdT%2Fnw%2FPbsYq%2BmVaLFnH362HIvIdXQQX3D%2F4uEo%3D&product%5Bstate%5D=active&commit=Save
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2015 06:00:16 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 93
Connection: keep-alive
Status: 302 Found
Location: http://URLXXX.com/p/9998812
Set-Cookie: makara-force-master=master; expires=Mon, 20-Jul-2015 06:00:21 GMT
Set-Cookie: csrf-param=authenticity_token; path=/
Set-Cookie: _ssn=c8a813425bc34cd850277f5745ff957e; domain=.URLXXX.com; path=/; expires=Mon, 20-Jul-2015 06:30:16 GMT; HttpOnly
X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge,chrome=1
Cache-Control: no-cache
X-Request-Id: 3bcc2b5f06cdd5215a613e01726559d9
X-Runtime: 0.160565
X-Served-By: app102.c1.prod
----------------------------------------------------------
http://URLXXX.com/p/9998812
GET /p/9998812 HTTP/1.1
Host: URLXXX.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:39.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/39.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1
Referer: http://URLXXX.com/p/9998812/s/fwkA-irHT-2kMfS
Cookie:
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2015 06:00:16 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 127
Connection: keep-alive
Status: 301 Moved Permanently
Vary: User-Agent
Location: http://URLXXX.com/p/9998812/productdetail
X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge,chrome=1
Cache-Control: no-cache
Set-Cookie: _ssn=c8a813425bc34cd850277f5745ff957e; domain=.URLXXX.com; path=/; expires=Mon, 20-Jul-2015 06:30:16 GMT; HttpOnly
X-Request-Id: 8b68dac5cb24355d19aa46c9ac22df61
X-Runtime: 0.020239
X-Served-By: app103.c1.prod
----------------------------------------------------------
http://URLXXX.com/p/9998812/productdetail
GET /p/9998812/productdetail HTTP/1.1
Host: URLXXX.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:39.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/39.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1
Referer: http://URLXXX.com/p/9998812/s/fwkA-irHT-2kMfS
Cookie:
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2015 06:00:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Status: 200 OK
Vary: User-Agent
X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge,chrome=1
Etag: W/"2e41a435d3ea497f97654949f587fb46"
Cache-Control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate
Set-Cookie: csrf-param=authenticity_token; path=/
Set-Cookie: _ssn=c8a813425bc34cd850277f5745ff957e; domain=.URLXXX.com; path=/; expires=Mon, 20-Jul-2015 06:30:17 GMT; HttpOnly
X-Request-Id: 7334d318bb69997260fd1b24f2d290de
X-Runtime: 0.369774
X-Served-By: app101.c1.prod
Content-Encoding: gzip
----------------------------------------------------------
Any help someone can provide me would be great. I really just want to understand how the pass the same parameters to the site so I can replicate the function.
Thanks

Answer 1

You need to send the request line, the headers, a blank line, and then the data (in the case of a POST request). For the example above this should look like this:
POST /p/9998812/update_availability HTTP/1.1
Host: URLXXX.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:39.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/39.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1
Referer: http://URLXXX.com/p/9998812/s/fwkA-irHT-2kMfS
Cookie:
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 138
utf8=%E2%9C%93&_method=put&authenticity_token=xMiaIdT%2Fnw%2FPbsYq%2BmVaLFnH362HIvIdXQQX3D%2F4uEo%3D&product%5Bstate%5D=active&commit=Save
You didn't say what you are using to make the request to the server. There are several very powerful tools (such as curl for Unix/Linux systems), and lots of very powerful and friendly libraries (for instance requests for Python) for almost every language, which you can use to make HTTP requests. These do a lot of the work of handling the details of the protocol for you.
If you are writing your own HTTP client, using lower-level networking libraries, you should seriously consider using one of these tools. If you have a good reason not to do this, you should look at the RFC which specifies HTTP: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html or at a comprehensive resource on HTTP.