How do I use Fiddler to modify the status code in an HTTP response?

Question

I need to test some client application code I\'ve written to test its\' handling of various status codes returned in an HTTP response from a web server.

I have Fiddler 2

Answer 1

Another alternative is to use Fiddler's AutoResponder tab (on the right-hand panel). This allows you to catch a request to any URI that matches a string and serve a "canned" response from a file. The file can contain both headers and payload. The advantage of this approach is that you don't have to write FiddlerScript and you don't have to handle each request manually via a breakpoint.

You would set the rule up in Fiddler like shown below (ensure you enable unmatched requests passthrough otherwise all other http requests will fail).

In this example, any request whose URI includes "fooBar" will get the canned response. The format of the file will vary depending on your APIs (you can use your browser to intercept a "real" response and base it on that) but mine looked like the following:

HTTP/1.1 409 Conflict
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.5; JBoss-5.0/JBossWeb-2.1
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, DELETE, PUT, PATCH, OPTIONS
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept, Authorization
Access-Control-Max-Age: 86400
Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json
Content-Length: 149
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2017 10:03:29 GMT

{"errors":[{"code":"OutOfStock","detail":"Item not in stock","source":{"lineId":{"type":"Order line Number","id":"1"}},"meta":{"availableStock":0}}]}

I found that it needed a carriage return at the end of the last line (i.e. after the json), and that the Content-Length header had to match the number of characters in the json, otherwise the webapp would hang. Your mileage may vary.