WUI Automation Examples

Compared to the process of automating tasks via the CLI, scripting the WUI is more complex. Although the primary intent of both the CLI and WUI is interaction with a live, human administrator, the practice of scripting a shell login is long established, and the various SSH clients in the industry have extensive support for noninteractive logins. Also, when using documented and supported CLI commands, the format and availability of the commands is unlikely to change across releases of AsyncOS. No such consistency is promised for the WUI; while the forms, pages, and asset locations have remained stable over many ESA software releases, it’s not guaranteed to remain the same in the future.

Despite the warnings, there are many good reasons to automate using the WUI. In some cases, like for reporting or XML data, there is simply no other way to access the information.