How to check user login state for a different site.

Question

Here is the situation. I have a site that only allows one user to be logged in at one time. However, I need a server to scrape this site and put data into the database. However the admin need to be be able to log into this site from time to time.

So what I would like is for the server to proxy the admins login so that the server won't attempt to login while the admin is logged in.

How would I go about doing this? Thanks

EDIT: Sorry, it totally slipped my mind, the reason I need to come up with such a complicated setup is because I do not have the source for this site, nor does the site allow any sort of extensibility. Basically I plan to add features by proxying the site through a more featured filled version of the page that will allow the user to access features not availilbe for the sites normal interface.

Answer 1

If this is a web application you've built yourself, you should be able to track this pretty easily. You just need code that stores the login state of your users in a global way. Possible ways of doing this would be to utilize the database (if this is database driven) or store it in an Application variable (if this is done in ASP.NET).

Then whatever process you've put in place where the server is "scraping" the site can check to see if anyone is logged in before logging in itself.

However, I must ask -- is this something you've built yourself or are you trying to add functionality to an existing product? The reason I ask is that I can't figure out why you tagged this with "proxy" and not the language it was written in. If you don't have access to the source code, for example, that would change things.