Find Out How

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. Please see a discussion of filtering below.

The message icons display with summary information displayed. Each message displays its’ corresponding HTTP operation (GET, POST, etc.) as well as URL, source and destination IP addresses. The different operations are color-coded.

The information available within the recording view may be summarized as follows:

1. The message sequence
2. Detailed information about each message
3. Detailed information about each packet (HTTP recordings only)
4. The relationship between packets and messages (HTTP recordings only)

The initial display shows the sequence of messages as a series of icons. The sequence may also be viewed as a list. The list tab is immediately to the right of the “Icon” tab towards the upper left hand side of the recording window.

The list view provides summary information about each message in a list. The thumb control to the right may be used to view the portion of the list outside the current window.

To view detail information about a message, return to the Icon view using the Icon tab. Find the desired message and click on the message icon. A detail view of the message appears in the space. A description of message detail information is provided in the topic “Working With HTTP(S) Messages”.

To view the network packets recorded, click on “Show Packets”, which is towards the upper right hand side of the recording window (HTTP recordings only).

This will cause the network packets recorded to display. These packets include all of the packets that made up the messages in your recording. When packets are shown, the relationship between the highlighted message and the corresponding packets is shown. The packets that correspond are highlighted in blue. Similarly, if you click on any given packet, the corresponding message will be highlighted. Some packets do not correspond to any message and thus will not cause a message to be highlighted.

To view detailed information about a packet, click on the icon for the packet. Detailed information about that packet will appear in the lower right hand portion of the recording screen.  A description of the information available for packet detail is available under the topic “Working With Packets In HTTP Recordings”. Packets are only available for HTTP recordings.

The display of messages can be filtered so that only those messages that meet the specified criteria will display. This can be very useful in narrowing the set of messages to examine. The filter is available in the upper right hand corner.

Clicking on “Filter” will cause the filter interface to display

Note that a filter was automatically applied by default. Normally the initial display of messages is limited to the first 100 messages. If your recording contained more than 100 messages, you may need to adjust the value of this filter to see additional messages.

This filter may be removed altogether by clicking on the “-“ icon on the right hand side of the filter display. You may add additional filtering criteria by clicking on the “+” icon. If you click on the “+” icon,  the filter display will contain an additional element.

To view the set of data values available for filtering, click on the down-arrow for the leftmost dropdown list box of the filter element. The resulting list will display the data values available for filtering.

If, for example, it was desirable to limit the displayed messages to all those that contained the word “Images” in the message’s URL, that data value would be selected from the list. The set of operations may be viewed by clicking on the down arrow of the subsequent dropdown list box.

Since we want any message that contains the word “Image”, “Contains” is the appropriate comparison operator.

Next, enter the value “Image” into the edit box to complete the filter specification.

The recording display will then adjust to display only those messages that meet the established filter criteria.