Posts Tagged “hackathon”
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Inspect your http requests with httpinspector
Last week at our Hackathon I got my hands dirty with Swift. In particular I was using NSURLConnection to post JSON http requests to a 3rd party web service. The web service wasn’t documented. All I had were a few request examples that I knew were successful before. So I needed my web service client to produce similar http headers and a similar JSON body.
My first attempts caused the server to return a 500 Internal Server Error. Without any more details to go with, I suspected that maybe some header value or JSON value in my http request was formatted incorrectly. In order to confirm my theory, I needed a way to analyze the http request that my application was producing.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a way to make NSURLConnection log out the complete request details including headers and payload. My next attempt was to use Charles, which is a Proxy that can be used to debug HTTP traffic. I was able to see all header values, but for some reason the JSON payload (raw body) was empty. After double and triple checking that I was correctly setting the HTTPBody of NSMutableURLRequest in my code and after changing numerous Charles settings, I still wasn’t able to see the actual payload of my request. Not wanting to lose any more time on this (we only had 2 days in total for our Hackathon projects), I decided to write a simple web server that would just print out all http request details.