Fiddler

Warning

Work in progress! We are in the process of updating the information on this page. Subject to change.

Fiddler is a free web debugging proxy server application. You can use it to trace the communication between the Resco mobile apps and the backend server, for example, during synchronization. If you send us the communication along with the description of the problem, this can greatly speed up the troubleshooting. You just need a Windows version of Resco Mobile CRM application and Fiddler. This guide describes a simple procedure for reporting such issues with the mentioned app.

Note	Using Fiddler may decrease performance. Do not use Fiddler once you're done troubleshooting.

How can Fiddler help

• Identify server requests taking too much time
• Identify requests/responses transmitting large data
• Identify bottlenecks in the client-server communication
• Identify repeating or duplicate requests

Install and configure Fiddler

Resco Windows version

1. Download and install a Windows version of Resco Mobile CRM. You can use the store version or the desktop version.
2. Get Fiddler from the official website and install it. We recommend using the "classic" version.
3. Launch Fiddler.
4. Select Tools > Options, go to the HTTPS tab and enable Decrypt HTTPS traffic.

Windows Store only

If you are using Windows Store version of Resco Mobile CRM, perform the following additional configuration in Fiddler.

Click WinConfig on the toolbar. Click Yes in the User Account Control window. Click Yes for Loopback exemptions. In the AppContainer Loopback Exemption Utility window, find Resco Mobile CRM and enable it, then click Save Changes.

Tips for tracing

If the issue is related to any time issue, like timeout, or when it takes too long to perform the action, enable filters. Go to the Filters tab and check Use Filters.

• If you want to filter by process (recommended), check Show only traffic from and select MobileCRM:xxxx.
• Optionally, enable the option Time HeatMap. When enabled, sessions are highlighted with background color, based on how long it took for the server to respond. Fastest responses are green, average are not highlighted, slow are yellow or red.

Try to reproduce the problem. You may need to start the traffic capture manually: Select Capture Traffic from the File menu. Do so before reproducing the issue to make sure all needed data is captured. If you are successful, save the session info and send it to us for review: select Save from the File menu.

Start/Stop capturing traffic

To capture only the traffic related to our issue, start capturing traffic right before executing an action (under inspection). Stop capturing traffic right after. We have three options to start/stop capturing available:

• Click File > click Capture Traffic.
• In the Status bar, click in the left corner.
• Press F12.

Filtering sessions

Fiddler captures traffic from all processes. We can use filtering to get only those sessions we need. There are three main options to filter traffic:

• Process picker
• Status bar
• Filters tab

Process picker (recommended)

Process picker is a very simple drag-and-drop tool. Users drag and drop the target on the Resco Mobile CRM application (process).

Status bar

Status bar offers very simple filtering by the process.

Filters tab

Filters tab offers more complex filtering. Here you can filter by the host, client, process, etc...

Finding session

The number of captured sessions can sometimes be overwhelming. To find the session you are looking for, use the Find tool.
Open the Find session window by either pressing Ctrl+F or clicking the Find in the top-level tab.

Enter what you are looking for in the Find Sessions window . In this case, we are looking for a request for an account entity. Therefore, we set Find: account, Search: Request only, and Examine: Bodies only (unless you are specifically looking for information in header, always use Bodies only).

Saving sessions (to export)

You may want to save the captured traffic for later review or send it to our support upon request.

To save captured traffic, go to File-->Save.

• If you want to save All Sessions, click All Sessions.
• If you want to save a specific session, select them and click Selected Sessions and (save) in ArchiveZip.

Inspecting fetch

While inspecting the fetch of a request, it's advised to export the fetch from Fiddler and visualize it in a formatted version.

1. Select the session which fetch you want to inspect and enter the Inspectors tab.
2. Open the request in XML format and locate fetch.
3. Right-click on fetch query and click Send to TextWizard.
4. Choose HTML Decode in Transform (to) dropdown menu.
5. Click To File... and save the fetch as an XML file.
6. Open the XML file in a browser.

Security

• Some companies may block Fiddler or require that it's uninstalled asap after use. The argument is that Fiddler’s root certificate can be misused by malicious apps. However, this issue is not that dramatic. The certificate is unique for the device where Fiddler is installed, hence external apps have no chance to know about it.

Fiddler and Woodford

You can use Fiddler also to trace the communication between Woodford and your backend server.

See also

• XrmToolBox - set of tools that simplify the customization, configuration, and operation of Dynamics backends