Rails - May 2006 - Need advice on how to inspect HTTP requests

I''m trying to debug a bug in my code and am looking for some general 
advice on how to go about isolating the problem.

The problem:
My Rails application talks to a WebDAV server via HTTPS. Thanks to the 
Ruby standard library, I was able to make authentication over SSL happen 
with just a few lines of code. Awesome! Now it gets a bit obscure. I''m 
using a PROPFIND request to the WebDAV server without a body (this 
implicitly means "give me everything"). This works. But when I put a 
query in the body, the WebDAV server returns a "400 - bad request". If
I
could get more details from the WebDAV server, this would be easy to 
debug. Unfortunately, this isn''t the case.

I''ve double- and triple-checked my syntax, so I know that''s
fine. I''ve
even made the same request via Ajax using the XmlHttpRequest object to 
the same server, this works fine too.

What I''d like to do:
Given that the server is opaque and I''ve got one request that works 
(XmlHttpRequest) and one that doesn''t (from Ruby), I would like to 
inspect both requests and see what''s different. I''m about to
investigate
WEBrick to see if I can use it as a forensic tool. I.e., send the 
request to my fake WEBrick app to inspect the packets and see what''s 
different between Ruby and XHR.

I wanted to see if anyone has advice on this approach before I invest 
more time in learning WEBrick programming. If there are any free tools 
for inspecting incoming HTTP requests, I''d love to hear about them.

Thanks!
--Ed Lau

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Ed Lau wrote:
> I wanted to see if anyone has advice on this approach before I invest 
> more time in learning WEBrick programming. If there are any free tools 
> for inspecting incoming HTTP requests, I''d love to hear about
them.
The Firefox Live HTTP Headers will let you observe the HTTP Headers, 
incoming and outgoing.


-- 

Ray

Ed,

If HTTP is enough for you then I can only recommend tcpwatch.py: It  
is a cute little utility that lets you watch your raw TCP traffic.  
However, it will not be worth much if you are using HTTPS since you  
will only see the encrypted garbage.

Manuel