HelpUiDialogsOptionsSpider

Options Spider screen

This screen allows you to configure the spider options.

It should be noted that modifying most of these options also affects the running Spider.

Maximum depth to crawl

The parameter defines the maximum depth in the crawling process where a page must be found in order for it to be processed. Resources found deeper than this level are not fetched and parsed by the spider.

The depth is calculated starting from the seeds, so, if a Spider scan starts with only a single URL (eg. Spider URL), the depth is calculated from this one. However, if the scan starts with multiple seeds (eg. Spider site), a resource is processed if it's depth relative to any of the seeds is less than the defined one.

Number of threads used

The spider is multi-threaded and this is the number that defines the maximum number of worker threads used in the crawling process. Changing this parameter does not have any effect on any crawling is in progress.

Domain Pattern

The normal behavior of the spider is to only follow links to resources found on the same domain as the page where the scan started. However, this option allows you to define additional domains that are considered "in scope" during the crawling process. Pages on these domains are processed during the scan.

Query parameters handling

When crawling, the Spider has an internal mechanism that marks which pages were already visited, so they are not processed again. When this check is made, the way the URIs parameters are handled is set using this option. There are three available options:

• Ignore parameters completely - if www.example.org/?bar=456 is visited, then www.example.org/?foo=123 will not be visited
• Consider only parameter's name (ignore parameter's value) - if www.example.org/?foo=123 is visited, then www.example.org/?foo=456 will not be visited, but www.example.org/?bar=789 or www.example.org/?foo=456&bar=123 will be visited
• Consider both parameter's name and value - if www.example.org/?123 is visited, any other uri that is different (including, for example, www.example.org/?foo=456 or www.example.org/?bar=abc) will be visited

Send "Referer" header

If the spider requests should be sent with the "Referer" header.

Process forms

During the crawling process, the behaviour of the spider when it encounters HTML forms is defined by this option. If disabled, the HTML forms will not be processed at all. If enabled, the HTML forms with the method defined as HTTP GET will be submitted with some generated values. The behaviour when encountering forms with the method defined as HTTP POST is configured by the next option.

POST forms

As briefly described in the previous paragraph (Process Forms), this option configures the behaviour of the spider when Process Forms is enabled and when encountering HTML forms that have to be POSTed.

Parse HTML Comments

This option defines whether the spider should also spider the HTML comments searching for links to resources. Only the resources found in commented valid HTML tags will be processed.

Parse 'robots.txt' files

This option defines whether the spider should also spider the robots.txt files found on websites, searching for links to resources. This option does not define whether the spider should follow the rules imposed by the robots.txt file.

Handle OData-specific parameters

This options defines whether the spider should try to detect OData-specific parameters (i.e. resources identifiers) in order to properly process them according to the rule defined by the "Query parameters handling" option.

See also

	UI Overview	for an overview of the user interface
	Spider	for an overview of the Spider
	Spider Tab	for an overview of the Spider tab