In this video, Software Engineer Swaraj Banerjee shows us how to examine the different parts of a web request in Charles Web Debugging Proxy.
Stay tuned for more installments as Swaraj continues to explore the most useful features of this tool.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, my name is Swaraj Banerjee and I am a software engineer for Expect Labs. We are building an API for developers. A lot of my day-to-day work involves making, tweaking, and debugging web requests. One of my favorite tools for working with web requests is Charles Web Debugging Proxy.
Charles Web Debugging Proxy is a tool that enables developers to view all HTTP/HTTPS traffic between their machine and a remote server. It offers the ability to record and inspect individual requests, make changes to requests, throttle bandwidth, map requests to different resources, and much more. In this series, I am going to show you Charles’ four most useful features. Here is how to examine the different parts of a web request.
So, I’ve got Charles open and let me just show you a little bit around the different parts of it. On the left over here we have the structure of the history of web requests. We can see all of the different files that were requested and various requests that were made. In this area, we can see details about the various requests, the response, and some summary about it. The first feature I would like to go over is viewing different parts of a request. Let’s make a new one. So here we made a request to this endpoint, (MindMeld2.alpha.expectlabs.com), and we hit our session and a specific session ID endpoint. In this tool we can see how long the request took, the various request parameters, such as what form parameters were setup. We can also see the response that we’ve received. We can also see the response in different formats, such as JSON, and we can kind of poke around in the different fields in here. This is one of the most useful features in Charles, just being able to dissect different parts of a request.
