Monitor server requests - asp.net-mvc

I have a ASP.NET MVC3 web application. To get data from third party, my application makes several HTTP requests from server. I want to see all the http requests made to the third party from server for each page loads. I have installed glimpse from nu-get package. but I could not see any remote HTTP calls made from server. I am debugging my application in my local machine. is it possible to get this information using glimpse? if not is there any other tool can help me out here?
Thanks!

Unfortunately, Glimpse does not currently show HTTP requests your application has made - but that sounds like a great feature!
You do have a few options:
Create a custom tab using Glimpse's extensibility model. You could tap into whatever HTTP client you are using and expose the data.
Additionally, you could leverage Glimpse's Trace Tab to trace out messages about your HTTP requests.
Finally, you could use ANTS Performance Profiler which recently added a feature to see all the HTTP requests an application makes, in addition to CPU level timing information and SQL queries. (And it has a free trial!)

Related

What application makes lots of HTTP OPTIONS requests?

I have an IIS/MVC.Net application that has recorded thousands of action-not-found exceptions. When I investigated these it appears that they are all HTTP OPTIONS requests to an MVC action that only supports GET.
This action allows caching and returns minified CSS or JS content. Within the application it's accessed by <link> and <script> tags in the <head>. The application is not making the requests and we haven't seen this in testing with any browser.
What application is making all these OPTIONS requests?
What is it expecting in return?
As stated here, an usual case triggering those Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery queries are mails including images hosted on your server and viewed with Outlook (MS Office Outlook, not Outlook Express).
That does trigger OPTIONS request, as if it was trying to check if the server has some webdav support. I speculate MS Office does that for enabling integration with Sharepoint, by example.
So I usually consider it is only some annoying noise.
If you host mail images on your MVC app IIS site, maybe could you consider to move them on a dedicated static IIS site. Of course, as you cannot change previously sent mails, you may have to maintain old images and you will continue to have those requests till users cease to open old mails. Otherwise you may have to tweak your logging logic to lower the log level of those noisy requests.

Web server for testing POST requests

I am developing part of an application which will POST requests to another server, and examine the request as the web server would see it.
Is there any web server that I can set up (quickly and easily) that will allow me to view the requests to it, and return a sensible code. It doesn't need to process the data in any way. It basically just for development / testing purposes.
You can use REST-client tool to observe the performance.

Unable to Distinguish between app server and Web Server in Rails

I just confused to distinguish between app server and web server.
as far as i know , web server handles user request , fetch from database and renders back to user and so on .
Now my question is what does a app server do in a web-application??
why it is useful to use app server along with web server ??
A Web server exclusively handles HTTP requests, whereas an application server serves business logic to application programs through any number of protocols.
An example
As an example, consider an online store that provides real-time pricing and availability information. Most likely, the site will provide a form with which you can choose a product. When you submit your query, the site performs a lookup and returns the results embedded within an HTML page. The site may implement this functionality in numerous ways. I'll show you one scenario that doesn't use an application server and another that does. Seeing how these scenarios differ will help you to see the application server's function.
Scenario 1: Web server without an application server
In the first scenario, a Web server alone provides the online store's functionality. The Web server takes your request, then passes it to a server-side program able to handle the request. The server-side program looks up the pricing information from a database or a flat file. Once retrieved, the server-side program uses the information to formulate the HTML response, then the Web server sends it back to your Web browser.
To summarize, a Web server simply processes HTTP requests by responding with HTML pages.
Scenario 2: Web server with an application server
Scenario 2 resembles Scenario 1 in that the Web server still delegates the response generation to a script. However, you can now put the business logic for the pricing lookup onto an application server. With that change, instead of the script knowing how to look up the data and formulate a response, the script can simply call the application server's lookup service. The script can then use the service's result when the script generates its HTML response.
In this scenario, the application server serves the business logic for looking up a product's pricing information. That functionality doesn't say anything about display or how the client must use the information. Instead, the client and application server send data back and forth. When a client calls the application server's lookup service, the service simply looks up the information and returns it to the client.
By separating the pricing logic from the HTML response-generating code, the pricing logic becomes far more reusable between applications. A second client, such as a cash register, could also call the same service as a clerk checks out a customer. In contrast, in Scenario 1 the pricing lookup service is not reusable because the information is embedded within the HTML page. To summarize, in Scenario 2's model, the Web server handles HTTP requests by replying with an HTML page while the application server serves application logic by processing pricing and availability requests.
Hope this is clear now!

Data scraping from the web using dart

I am making a web application, in which i need to scrape the web to get some data. I can't see a way to do this without using the dart:io.HttpConnection which is not imporatble for web apps. What should i do, Can i make a server application and then use it with a client version, or something else?
You would need to build this server side since the browser security model does not allow you to connect to other origins than the one that served your application (unless of cause you can use JSONP or CORS to do the scraping but I doubt that). So you need to create a service on your server that uses HttpClient to do the scraping for you and then call this service from your client using XMLHttpRequest

What is the standard method for a website to communicate with a win32 executable?

I have some delphi code which, given a list of items, calculates the total price taking into account any special deals that might apply.
This code is non-trivial to rewrite in another language.
How should I set it up to communicate with a website running on the same server? The website will need to ask it for a price every time the user updates their shopping cart. It's possible that there will be multiple concurrent requests.
The delphi code needs to maintain an in-memory list of special deals, periodically refreshed from a database. So it cannot simply be executed every time or anything as simple as that.
I don't know what the website is written in, or even which http server it runs under, so I'm just looking for ideas or standard methods.
It sounds like the win32 app is already running as a Windows Service on the box. So, if you can't modify that service, you are going to have to deal with whatever way it wants to accept and respond to requests. This could be through sockets or some higher level communication protocol like web services.
You could do a couple of things. Write an assembly that knows how to communicate with the service and have your web site use that assembly. Or you could build a shim service that knows how to communicate with the legacy service, but exposes communication over higher level protocols such as web services. Either way will have the benefit of hiding the concurrency, threading and communications issue behind an easy to call interface, but the latter will make communicating with the service easier for everyone going forward.
If you can modify the delphi app to take an XML request and respond with an XML answer over a TCP socket (ideally using the HTTP protocol), you will be able to make it interoperate with most web server frameworks relatively easily. But the exact details of how to make that integration happen will depend on the language/framework it was written in.
If the web server is on windows you can compile your delphi app as a DLL that can return XML or HTML, taking parameters as part of the URL or a POST operation. Some details on making a Delphi DLL for web servers are here.
It doesn't matter what web server or OS the existing system is running under. What matters is what you want YOUR code to run under. If it is windows then the easiest solution would be to use WebBroker and write a custom ISAPI application, or use SOAP to expose web services. The first method could be used if you wanted to write a rest like API for instance, the second if your web application has the ability to consume web services.
Another option, if you are running both on the same box under IIS, is to create a COM/Automation object which you then invoke via server side scripting (ASP). If the application is an ASP.NET application, then I would use PRISM to port your code into an assembly.
I have done this with a quite complicated workers compensation calculator. I created a windows service using RemObjects Sdk. The calculations are exposed as a soap method so it can be accessed by nearly anything.
It's not necessary to use RemObjects in the service but it makes it much easier to do as it handles a lot of the underlying plumbing. The clients don't need RemObjects, they just need to be able to call soap methods. Nearly any programming langugae can do that.
You could also create an isapi dll for IIS that exposes a soap interface. This would be useful if other websites on different servers needed access to the methods. However I have handled this in my case by opening a port in the firewall to access my windows service.
There is a lot of examples on the web. A couple of places to start reading are About.Com and Dr Bob.
Torn this app into Windows Service. Write Web Service that will communicate with your windows service. You should spend some time designing your Web Service, because this Web Service is going to be your consistent interface, shielding old Delphi app. So in the future whenever you will want to write web app, mobile app, or whatever you will imagine, you will have one consistent interface – XML Web Service.
A popular way to integrate a web application with background services is a message broker.
The message flow would be:
the web application sends a "calculation request" message to a message destination on the message broker, which contains all needed parameters and also a correlation id to match the calculation request with the response from the Delphi service
one (or, in a high availability / load balanced environment more) Delphi services handle the messages: pull the next incoming message, process it by feeding the parameters to the calculation engine, and send a "calculation result message" back to the web server
the web server can either synchronously wait for the response (and discard responses which have no matching correlation ide) and build the result HTML document, or continue with other tasks and asynchronously receive the calculation result in a separate thread, for example in a Ajax based web application
See for an introduction this slideshow about the Dopplr image service:
http://de.slideshare.net/carsonified/dopplr-its-made-of-messages-matt-biddulph-presentation
If you can make it a service (but not a library), you have to do inter-process communication somehow - there are a few ways to do this on Windows:
Sockets directly which is hardest since you have to do marshalling/auth yourself
Shared Memory (yuck!)
RPC which works great but isn't trivial
DCOM which is easier but a pain to configure
WCF - but can you call it from your Windows Service written in Delphi?

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