Get actual raw request/response

[sonicflare]

Hello,
I want to log actual http raw request/response that have been sent out to minimize troubleshooting time. Is there a way to do that?

[dgritsko]

This would be really valuable.

[vk5880]

Is it still not availiable?

[vk5880]

Please make it, so simple...

[alexeyzimarev]

@vk5880 if it is so simple, why won't you make it? I will happily accept your PR.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[repo-ranger]

⚠️ This issue has been marked wontfix and will be closed in 3 days

[alexeyzimarev]

Btw, response.RawBytes has always been there...

[seannybgoode]

@alexeyzimarev - not the case for request.RawBytes though

[ferib]

@alexeyzimarev those response.RawBytes just seem to represent response.Content, but is there any other method to obtain the actual "raw" data of the request? Data that's not been deserialized?

[alexeyzimarev]

ok, so it's about the request, right? how deserialisation applies to the request? requests don't get deserialised, it's the opposite.

[ferib]

@alexeyzimarev Oh okay thanks for your answer, I tried to deserialize before using RestClient.Execute<string>(request) which didn't work, so I ended up using JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string>(response.Content) to get the "raw" string from the response.

[alexeyzimarev]

I am not sure why would you are trying to do. Deserialise to a string? The content is already a string, what’s there to deserialise?

[ferib]

@alexeyzimarev For example, the content I requested was returned as \"Hello\\nWorld\", I didn't like the fact that it decided to add multi quotes to start and end and that it added escape characters to it. All I wanted was the string.

[alexeyzimarev]

You can just unescape the string instead.

[ferib]

@alexeyzimarev that's kind of what I'm trying to achieve yes, but don't know of any other way.

[alexeyzimarev]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.regularexpressions.regex.unescape?view=netcore-3.1 maybe?

[alexeyzimarev]

@softlion if it's "unacceptable", I would suggest opening a pull request to make it happen. Easy, right? "Contributions for an easier world"...

[alexeyzimarev]

Of course you did. That's how ".NET community" contributes in general, I assume.

[ChaseFlorell]

I'm curious @alexeyzimarev (I don't use RestSharp), can this framework accept custom Delegating Handlers?
I help maintain another project that might help solve this problem.

It seems like any sort of middleware between the HttpClient and RestSharp should be able to capture the details requested by the OP.

https://www.nuget.org/packages/HttpTracer/

[alexeyzimarev]

@ChaseFlorell thanks, it looks great!

Basically, the most obvious issue was always that RestSharp used the legacy HttpWebRequest, which hides the HttpClient instance inside it. With v107 the issue is gone. People can either use RestClient that instantiates its own HttpClient, or provide either their own HttpClient or HttpMessageHandler. This means that all the HttpClient instrumentation and middleware will work.

But this particular issue is weird as RestSharp was never composing raw request bytes, it was (and is) using what .NET provides for making HTTP calls. As long as you know how to observe HTTP calls, you should be good.

Your library is trivial to connect to v107 I would assume.

[alexeyzimarev]

Ok, to make things even simpler I added an option to configure the handler for the case when one is not creating the handler themselves. That's how it can be used:

    public MultipartFormDataTests(ITestOutputHelper output) {
        _output = output;
        _server = SimpleServer.Create(RequestHandler.Handle);

        var options = new RestClientOptions(_server.Url) {
            ConfigureMessageHandler = handler => new HttpTracerHandler(handler, new OutputLogger(output), HttpMessageParts.All)
        };
        _client = new RestClient(options);
    }

I added to one of the tests and it works great. Thanks again @ChaseFlorell :)

[wilkovanderveen]

Ok, to make things even simpler I added an option to configure the handler for the case when one is not creating the handler themselves. That's how it can be used:

    public MultipartFormDataTests(ITestOutputHelper output) {
        _output = output;
        _server = SimpleServer.Create(RequestHandler.Handle);

        var options = new RestClientOptions(_server.Url) {
            ConfigureMessageHandler = handler => new HttpTracerHandler(handler, new OutputLogger(output), HttpMessageParts.All)
        };
        _client = new RestClient(options);
    }

I added to one of the tests and it works great. Thanks again @ChaseFlorell :)

How to do this with the .net core ILogger interface. Where does the output go?

[alexeyzimarev]

It's the Xunit test output. HttpTraceHandler has a simple logging interface that can have any implementation.
https://github.com/BSiLabs/HttpTracer/blob/master/src/HttpTracer/Logger/ILogger.cs