Integrations · API-less state portal
Court-case search on a portal with no public API
Client:
sattar.kz
Category: Integrations
Stack: PHP, cURL, DOMDocument/DOMXPath, JSF session emulation
Timeline: 1–2 weeks
sattar.kz
Category: Integrations
Stack: PHP, cURL, DOMDocument/DOMXPath, JSF session emulation
Timeline: 1–2 weeks
Problem
At sattar.kz, counterparty court cases needed to be searched programmatically on a state court portal — there is no public API, only a dated JSF/RichFaces web interface.
Constraints
The portal runs on a legacy Java/JSF stack with no REST: form field IDs and markup shift between portal releases, and authentication relies entirely on session state.
What I did
- Browser session emulation: a cookie jar plus handling of the JSF ViewState and Ajax partial-response
- Login and case search by party name with court and year filters
- A DOMXPath result parser with cascading selectors and fallback strategies for markup changes
- Deduplicating results and returning structured JSON instead of raw HTML
- Configuration moved into constants for quick re-tuning without touching the parsing logic
Architecture
Court portal (JSF/RichFaces)
→ Session emulation
→ XPath parser
→ JSON API
Result
Searching for a counterparty's cases became a programmatic JSON call instead of a manual trip to the portal, resilient to small markup changes thanks to fallback parsing.
What can be reused
Pattern for emulating a legacy JSF portal with no REST API
XPath parsing with graceful fallback on markup changes
Scraping-result deduplication