[webdriver] Anyone using Firebug + NetExport + Auto Export to get HTTP logs? Any tricks to match urls and exports?

We use Firebug + NetExport, but haven't done any matching of the HAR files to other results so far. For our purposes, parsing the HAR files generated for server errors, 404s, etc., and looking for long running requests (which are still at the point of being pretty much every time the request is made and not so much as a direct result of a particular action for our app at the moment).

I'd think, though, that matching probably shouldn't be that hard if you have something logging date stamps for your results already. NetExport auto-exports to a file that uses a <server>+<Y-M-D>+<H-M-S>.har naming convention. We get one file per page visit (though some of our AJAX calls don't seem to necessarily make it into the export - we haven't yet taken the time to investigate that, but they're always ones that start after the page load), and the results in the HAR file also include some date stamps. Most of these date stamps use the client machine time, so should match up fairly well. There may be a few in the response sections of the files that show server time, but those are in the minority. You could either build some sort of matcher that ran after the test run, parsing the results log and the HAR files and matching entries, or you could have a thread watch for new files where you point NetExport and do some sort of matching on the fly (maybe each new file results in a log message of "End HAR file: foo-2012-04-24+15-32-23.har" or something like that?).

One thing that would probably be a good general tip is turn on the preference that auto-compresses the HAR files. Some of them can be fairly big uncompressed - they have the entire contents of every file requested by the browser in them. (Set the extensions.firebug.netexport.compress preference to true when you're building your Firefox profile).

Good luck! There's a lot of useful information in those HAR files.

Andy

From: webdriver@googlegroups.com On Behalf Of FireGuy
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 4:21 PM
To: webdriver@googlegroups.com
Subject: [webdriver] Anyone using Firebug + NetExport + Auto Export to get HTTP logs? Any tricks to match urls and exports?

I'm looking to get HTTP exports with my tests, I read about this neat trick of using firebug+netexport plugin to get automatic exports in HAR format.
I'm afraid that if I run multiple tests to the same URL (or get redirected to the same url) I won't be able to programatically match the test result and the relevant HAR export.

Is there any trick that I can use to pass information to NetExport? I thought of something like passing a special GUID in ar request header, but I couldn't find a way of manipulating headers with webdriver (I already know it's directly impossible) - but maybe there's a way of changing firefox preferences on the fly? Or communicating with other firefox add-ons? I know that firebug exposes some APIs, but is there a way of communicating with it from webdriver?

Thanks