Skip to main content

Intercepting Core Service traffic with Fiddler

Image
By
Fiddler2 is a proxy that runs locally on your machine and stays in-between a client (i.e. typically your browser) and the remote server. It can this way intercept the communication between the two and display it in various formats.

So, in order to intercept communication with the Core Service, one should configure their Core Service client application to use the Fiddler proxy. The proxy installs itself on your local machine (when Fiddler starts), and on port 8888.

Intercepted communication shows up in Fiddler somewhat like this:

So, how do I specify a proxy in my client application? That depends on the technology used.

Java Core Service Clients

There are several ways of doing this, but the idea is that we need to set two properties:
  • http.proxyHost - the host name or IP of the proxy server (i.e. localhost for Fiddler);
  • http.proxyPort - the port the proxy is listening to (i.e. 8888 for Fiddler);
If you have access to the code, you can set them using the System.setProperty method:

      // Fiddler proxy
      System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", "localhost");
      System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", "8888");

If you have access to the JVM, set the system properties in the startup sequence of the JVM (using the -D notation):

    java -Dhttp.proxyHost=localhost -Dhttp.proxyPort=8888 ...

.Net Core Service Clients

Fiddler installs itself as default proxy and .Net uses the default system proxy by default :) So there is nothing specific you need to setup for .Net.

The only caveat is that I couldn't get it to work -- namely, the basicHttp authentication fails when communication goes through the Fiddler proxy. The following error message shows up:

The HTTP request is unauthorized with client authentication scheme 'Negotiate'. The authentication header received from the server was 'Negotiate,NTLM'.

However, I can see the authentication attempts are intercepted by Fiddler.

UPDATE: If I use wsHttp endpoint, the authentication negotiation is successful and Fiddler intercepts the communication correctly.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Toolkit - Performance

By
This post if part of a series about the File System Toolkit  - a custom content delivery API for SDL Tridion. This post presents performance data that was captured for each major functionality with and without caching Linking, CP Assembler, Component Presentation Factory, Dynamic Content Queries, Model Factory. The data was captured on a 2014 Macbook Pro 15", 16 GB RAM, 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 running OS X El Capitan. Test methodology: each test was run for 3 minutes and the total number of successful Toolkit API calls was measured. Then the number of calls per second was computed 'with cache' and 'without cache' test runs. Then a cache boost factor was calculated by diving (the number of API calls with cache) / (number of API calls without cache). Each cache test was executed 3 times, with different cache time-to-live values of 1 second, 5 seconds and 0 seconds (eternal cache, no expiration). The rationale is to see what impact different cache expiration/evi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Running sp_updatestats on AWS RDS database

By
Part of the maintenance tasks that I perform on a MSSQL Content Manager database is to run stored procedure sp_updatestats . exec sp_updatestats However, that is not supported on an AWS RDS instance. The error message below indicates that only the sa  account can perform this: Msg 15247 , Level 16 , State 1 , Procedure sp_updatestats, Line 15 [Batch Start Line 0 ] User does not have permission to perform this action. Instead there are several posts that suggest using UPDATE STATISTICS instead: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/145982/sp-updatestats-vs-update-statistics I stumbled upon the following post from 2008 (!!!), https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/186e3db0-fe37-4c31-b017-8e7c24d19697/spupdatestats-fails-to-run-with-permission-error-under-dbopriveleged-user , which describes a way to wrap the call to sp_updatestats and execute it under a different user: create procedure dbo.sp_updstats with execute as 'dbo' as...
2 comments
Read more

A Core Service Java Client

By Unknown
I have seen many times the creation of a .NET client for SDL Tridion's Core Service, but not once a Java client. In .NET / Visual Studio is extremely easy to create the proxy classes based on the service's WSDL. So how hard can it be in Java? The entire code in this example is available in my Google Code project . Which Tool? Doing a bit of research on the multiple ways of creating Java proxy classes for web services left me quite confused as to which framework / utility to use. They are quite a few (AXIS, JAXB, Apache CXF, XFire, NetBeans plugin, IDEA plugin, Eclipse plugin, etc). They seemed to be cumbersome to use, too specific, limited, quirky, buggy, etc. What I wanted was a simple generic too that worked. Enter wsimport.exe ... Generating the Proxies Note: Check out the update post available here  http://yatb.mitza.net/2012/12/java-core-service-trouble-with-datetime.html Wsimport.exe is part of the JDK (mine is located in C:\Progrm Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_33\bin ),...
3 comments
Read more