Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data.
Download Fiddler from http://www.fiddler2.com/, it’s freeware! It runs on Windows, but can debug traffic originating in any operating system (by making that OS point to Fiddler on Windows as a proxy). Before reading this you should read these articles which provide an overview of Fiddler.
Stubbing network responses
During development with a third party it’s often handy to insulate yourself from any downtime/network problems that might affect your testing. Quite often this involves writing a piece of code to simulate network responses and pointing your app to that. Instead of doing this, turn to Fiddler.
Record and replay
Configure your application to use Fiddler as a proxy (see this for .NET apps, use localhost:8888), then hit your third party endpoint with your application. Fiddler will capture the traffic in the session list. Now, click on the Auto Responder tab and enable Automatic Responses. Drag each row from the session list into the Auto Responder list. Now re-run your app, and instead of connecting to the remote machine, Fiddler will auto-respond for you. (If you are using SSL, read how to decrypt SSL traffic and also in .NET you’ll need to suppress the invalid man-in-the-middle cert that Fiddler uses by returning true in the ServerCertificateValidationCallback
From an interface spec
If you have an interface spec but no endpoint to hit, create a file matching the content you expect to be returned, define a match for the URI, and use your sample file as the response content. See AutoResponder reference for more information.
You can use regex pattern matching for the URI, and you can either respond with a local file, or captured session. With a regex to match the entire host you can make all calls to your network resource respond with a HTTP 403 Denied and ensure your app behaves as expected.
Custom rules to show Akamai cached pages
I’ve used Akamai edge caching on a number of sites over the past few years to improve site performance, and it’s always useful to see which pages are being served from cache, and which aren’t. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to add a custom rule to Fiddler to highlight requests for me. From Fiddler, choose Rules, Customize Rules. In the Javascript that opens, enter the following code:
With the other field definitions…
public static RulesOption("Highlight Akamai cache Hits")
var m_HighlightAkamaiHits: boolean = false;
In the “OnBeforeRequest” method…
if (m_HighlightAkamaiHits) {
oSession.oRequest.headers.Add("Pragma", "akamai-x-get-cache-key");
oSession.oRequest.headers.Add("Pragma", "akamai-x-cache-on");
oSession.oRequest.headers.Add("Pragma", "akamai-x-cache-remote-on");
oSession.oRequest.headers.Add("Pragma", "akamai-x-get-true-cache-key");
oSession.oRequest.headers.Add("Pragma", "akamai-x-check-cacheable");
oSession.oRequest.headers.Add("Pragma", "akamai-x-get-extracted-values");
oSession.oRequest.headers.Add("Pragma", "akamai-x-get-nonces");
oSession.oRequest.headers.Add("Pragma", "akamai-x-get-ssl-client-session-id");
oSession.oRequest.headers.Add("Pragma", "akamai-x-serial-no");
}
In the “OnBeforeResponse” method…
if (m_HighlightAkamaiHits) {
if (oSession.oResponse.headers.ExistsAndContains("X-Cache","TCP_MEM_HIT")) {
oSession["ui-customcolumn"] = "HIT";
} else if (oSession.oResponse.headers.ExistsAndContains("X-Cache","TCP_IMS_HIT")) {
oSession["ui-customcolumn"] = "HIT";
}
}
Now close the Javascript file, and go back to Fiddler. If you made any mistakes in the Javascript, Fiddler will tell you immediately. From the Rules menu you now have a new option – “Highlight Akamai cache Hits”. Enable this, and visit http://www.facebook.com/ in your browser. In Fiddler, you should see the word “HIT” for several of the requests in the “custom” column. You can rearrange the column order to move the custom column if you like.
Add request time
This is a simple new rule but surprisingly handy.
With the other field definitions…
public static RulesOption("Show response time")
var m_ShowResponseTime: boolean = false;
Add to either “OnBeforeRequest” or “OnBeforeResponse” method…
if (m_ShowResponseTime) {
oSession["ui-customcolumn"] = DateTime.Now.ToString();
}
Remember when using these rules that when you save the Javascript file, the Rules menu will be reset so any previously enabled rules will need re-enabling.
Fiddler also has a nice set of C# APIs which allow you to embed the fiddler engine directly into your test suite, which makes for a really nice set of integration tests (using the AutoResponder) with only a few lines of code. I’ll go into this in a future post.
