Flex Remote Service Verbose Mode?

Question

Is there a way to display or log verbose communication DURING a remote service call with flex? In particular is there a way to get very detailed information about the service call while it is happening. Kind of like tracing HTTP headers from a command line. Basically, getting insight into the server transaction before the result or fault events occur?

I am assuming there must be a convenient way to expose stuff like IP addresses, DNS lookups, number of hops, latency, HTTP headers, AMF data as it is coming over the wire, etc.

Answer 1

Use http://www.getcharles.com it's very very awesome mac and pc proxy tool that will show you all the data going between flex and the server.

Its made be a good friend of mine but not only does it allow you to see all the HTTP details, headers etc. It will also show the details of AMF data and even allow you to edit these requests (including the AMF data) and send it to the server again. This is great if you want to just get the server code working.
It even has the ability to capture a response and allow you to edit this (slightly more tricky) but very powerful.

It is shareware so you can try it but it *will save you hours. I use it probably daily and it is well worth it's price in saved development time easily.

Cheers, John.

Answer 2

Charles is a must have.

You can put TraceTarget in you main mx:Application and get a lot of data back from most of the remoting classes in Flex:

<mx:TraceTarget/>

It sets your app as the logging target and traces to the console.

Read your comment, if you want an interesting non-debug way to display data, Arthropod is a cool AIR 'console' that you can trace out to.