Quality Center api using only HTTP?

Question

So.. I set up IE to use WebScarab as a proxy, and then logged into Quality Center. Lo and behold, the program uses HTTP to do all its communication with the server, and the all commands and responses are human-readable text. It ain't XML, it ain't JSON, but its human-readable and I'm pretty sure I could write it if I had to.

So.. is this protocol documented anywhere? Are you "supposed" to be able to use this? Anybody have any experience using it anyway?

And yes I am aware that they have a COM api, but I have a feeling that the crashy behavior I normally experience from QC is probably in the COM objects, so any software I might write that uses them would exhibit the same behavior.

Answer 1

The officially supported method for communicating with QC is via the published Open Test Architecture (OTA) API which is very well documented. I think you would have your work cut-out trying to re-write the API at a lower HTTP level. Lots of people are using the OTA API successfully to customise QC and write third-party extensions. Also many of the COM idiosyncrasies are now documented on the .NET. Maybe you can elaborate on the sorts of problems you are having with the COM API?