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Working With HTTP(S) Messages

To work with an HTTP or HTTPS recording, locate the recording you would like to work with by navigating to the Repository tab within SOASTA CloudTest. Click on the Recordings item towards the upper left hand side of the screen. All of the recordings available will display. Select the recording desired from the list of recordings. To open a recording, you may either double-click the item or right-mouse and select “Open”.

The recording should then appear as shown. The recorded messages appear as a series of icons. You may use the slider immediately beneath the icons to view messages that fall outside the current viewing window. The default viewing window displays the first 100 messages. If the recording contains more than 100 messages and you wish to view more, use the filter to adjust the number of messages in the display.

To view detail information about a message, click on the message icon. Detailed information about that message will display in the area beneath the display of message icons.

Each message contains both request and response information. The detailed information available for a message may be summarized as follows:

  1. General request and response information. The request URL, for example.
  2. Request and response headers
  3. Request and response content

The general request and response information displays first as in the following example:

The general request and response information displays the following information

Sequence Number

The number of the message within the recorded sequence

Source IP

The IP address from which the request was sent

Destination IP

The IP address of the responding host

Method

The HTTP method. In this case, the method was POST. Other typical HTTP methods are GET, POST, PUT and DELETE

Protocol

Always http for recordings.

Response Code

The response code is the code returned by the responding host for this request. In this case, the response code was 200, which signifies that the response was returned without an error. A Non-200 response code may indicate an error condition

URL

The URL indicates the requested resource on the host system.
 

The request and response headers are displayed next as in the following example:

HTTP request and response headers contain various parameters that control the interaction between the requesting client and the responding host.  For example, the request will typically contain the header “Accept –Encoding”. In this case, the value for that header is “gzip,deflate” which tells the responding host the form of the response the requesting client is prepared to accept. The response will typically include the header “Content-Encoding”. In this case, the value for that header is “gzip”, which tells the client the form of the response. A complete explanation of all HTTP headers is beyond the scope of this brief explanation.

Finally, the message information contains the request and response content as in the following example:

In this case the request was an XML document that contains information to be “posted” to the host. The response was an XML document as well with information about the posted information. In this case the response was in “gzip” format (a compressed archive format). The information has been decompressed so that the response can be viewed in textual form.

If the response is in the form of an image, the image will be displayed as the response content.

 

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