Export Sessions to Visual Studio WebTest removes Referer headers

[Christian]

Is there a way to control which headers that are filtererd out during an export of sessions to a Visual Studio WebTest file?

Since Microsoft is dropping support for both IE11 and Visual Studio Loadtesting features, the Web Test Recorder is becoming more and more of a problem for recording webtest files. For that reason we have started to use Fiddler instead, but noticed several draw backs, the worst being that all requests have the Referer header removed during export (even with ALL options disabled during save).

Another draw back is that Fiddlers option to handle Redirects in such export does not seem to be working. Requests that are caused by the browser following a redirect har exported like any other normal request (in the webtest request the option is set to Follow Redirects on all of these as well). We can handle this problem manually and remove the requests in a redirect chain, but the Referer header removal is a bigger problem.

If this is not available as a config setting somewhere, is it possible to change this behaviour? If not, is it possible to get the code for the export plugin so we can modify the behaviour? If that is not possible, can we create/code our own plugins to the WebTest exporter?

[Nick Iliev]

Hello Christian,

As you have observed, the Visual Studio WebTest file support was deprecated from Microsoft back in 2019. Microsoft stated they are no longer recommending using these files for load testing (or other purposes). That said, the Fiddler team is no longer supporting the format, so you should not expect any updates related to existing or new functionalities.

The above said, an applicable option for you would be to create your custom FIddler exporter. You can use this KB article as a reference on how to approach the problem.

 

Regards,
Nick Iliev
Progress Telerik

[Eric]

It's unfortunate that Telerik isn't willing to make a change here, but you might be able to just hack it up yourself (obviously, it would not be supported). If you open VSWebTestExport.dll in a hex editor, you can find the string Referer (which will appear with nulls between each letter, like 52 00 65 00 66...) and overwrite the first character (52) with some other letter (e.g. 65).