Capturing Requests with the Built-in Web Capture Tool

WebSurge allows you to capture live requests via a browser session using the Request Capture form. You can access the form the menu via Session->Capture Requests in Web Browser, or by pressing the icon on the Toolbar.

The Request Capture Form

This form contains an inline Web browser that you can use to capture requests by navigating your browser through your application. As you browse requests are captured as an Http Trace and presented as text below the browser:

The captured result is a list of Http Requests in simple trace format and it is editable so you can optionally remove unwanted requests. Each request is separated by a line of dashes so it's easy to pick out individual requests to edit/cut/paste.

You can also enable a couple of filters that let you filter by Url/domain or capture only first line requests (Pages, API calls, XHR/Fetch requests) and ignore asset requests.

When done you click on Save to create a new Session file from the captured requests. Alternately you can also copy the requests to the clipboard and import them using the Requests -> Import From Clipboard option and add them to currently open Session.

How to capture Requests

To start navigation:

Set your Filters (see below)
Toggle the Capture Requests button to selected (it highlights)
Type the start Url into the Address box at the top of the form
Press Enter or Tab to navigate
Start navigating in the browser to capture content

When done:

Untoggle the Capture Requests Button
Make any changes to the captured requests in the Text area below
Click the Save button to save requests to a new Session File
Or: Copy requests from the Text area to the Clipboard
- Use Session->Import Requests from Clipboard to add to existing Session
- Paste requests into an existing Session (.websurge) file

Filters

Url and Domain Filter

This filter allows you to use a RegEx expression to filter the URL or domain. The default value is * which captures all Urls and domains.

Common Examples:

* - all Urls
*://albumviewer.west-wind.com/* - specific domain
*://albumviewer.west-wind.com/docs/* - specific domain and sub-folder

Top Level Requests Filter

When doing Load Tests it's often not very useful to request asset files like images, scripts, css etc. Usually tests are most concerned with server requests that perform logic operations and return dynamic results. The Filter toggle button on the menu when set only causes only top level requests to be captured. This includes:

Initiating Requests from navigation, link clicks
Page reloads, redirects etc.
XHR/Fetch requests from within script in a page