Where are my endpoints and what are the AJAX requests doing?

Question

I'm testing to see how multiple APIs are performing when run concurrently. My question is that I see on the Developer Tools and Fiddler when the AJAX requests are happening and where they get populated in the UI, so I have an idea of where they're coming from, but I can't find the specific "endpoint" something like "/api/v1/member/{member-number}" to confirm that it is coming from this API call.

I'm not sure if it will necessarily show up on the developer tools or fiddler, but I do have the specific API endpoints given to me for when I tested them as standalone. However, I can't find it to confirm on the UI so that I know I'm hitting the correct point.

I may be over-complicating it by trying to understand what each AJAX request does, and am curious if this is even necessary also? I may just need to follow the network path and see which parameters to correlate, I'm guessing.

Answer 1

Black-box reverse engineering is not something you should be normally doing.

AJAX requests are being triggered by client-side JavaScript so if you want to trace an AJAX call you could use JavaScript Debugger which is available in your browser developer tools

Be ready to the fact that JavaScript could be minified and additionally obfuscated so it might be quite hard to read and understand. So I would rather reach out to the application developers and ask them to share/explain the source code.

Given you have jmeter in your tags I would suggest just

1. Recording your requests using HTTP(S) Test Script Recorder
2. Identify which ones are being executed in parallel
3. Put those under the Parallel Controller

As in order to be able to come up with a proper JMeter script you don't need to understand what each and every request is doing and where does it come from, you need to replicate real browser's network footprint.