capturing ajax requests

Question

I want to capture an ajax http request w/ all of its headers/cookies/post params being sent to save it so I can scrape it later.

I can't find a good way of doing this with firefox or chrome. Firebug truncates long post paramters saying "... Firebug request size limit has been reached by Firebug. ... " in the middle of it, which doesn't help me.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

you can use the jmeter proxy for the apache jmeter project

a tutorial can be found here (pdf file)

Answer 2

I like to use HTTP Fox. A plugin for firefox that can capture all your requests. It will catch all requests even the ones that are not AJAX but it provides you the raw data for both the request and response.

Answer 3

Try to use the HAR file format if you can. It is supported by tools such as Firebug (via NetExport) and HttpWatch.

Answer 4

You can use Fiddler. It captures all port 80 traffic between you and the server for later review. In it you can then look at all the headers, cookies, parameters, etc.. all in Raw or organized forms for each and every request (both normal and ajax calls).

It has proven to be invaluable to me in debugging my ajax heavy web app.

Answer 5

There is a Firefox plugin that I use called LiveHTTPHeaders. It captures everything you would need and isn't as low level as Wireshark or Fiddler. Very easy and quick to use, just enable, make the ajax request, and save the data for later.