Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

Using a TCP Trace Utility

Have you wondered how you can view the HTTP headers going back and forth between Flash Remoting and your client movie? Or how you can view the AMF data that Flash Remoting uses to communicate? Or how to see the SOAP packets that are going back and forth from Flash Remoting to a web service? A TCP trace utility can be a good debugging tool when you are building applications that access web services or when you are having problems with client/server communication.

Basically, a TCP trace tool listens to a port and outputs any activity to a window so that you can examine it or save it to a file. For example, if you are sending a request to a web service and receiving a response that is inaccurate, you can examine the SOAP packet directly using a TCP trace utility.

TCP trace utilities can be used on the client and on the server. If your local machine is acting as client and server during debugging, you can open up two different sessions in the TCP trace utility and examine the requests and responses to HTTP requests.

We examine some of the popular TCP trace utilities in the following sections.

SOAP Trace Utility

Microsoft offers a SOAP toolkit that contains a trace utility called MSSOAPT.exe. You can find it at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads

Its usefulness as a tool does not stop with SOAP, however. It can also be used to examine your AMF headers to and from the Flash Remoting gateway, or any other HTTP packets.

Tip

There are other utilities that work ...