REST Client adds header to a request without a way to inspect what is added

I spent several hours today to diagnose an issue until I learned that REST client adds some headers to REST calls without providing any way to inspect what is added.

When a cookie or header is automatically added to a request, REST client needs to provide a way to let us know what exactly is added:

rest-client.rememberCookiesForSubsequentRequests rest-client.defaultHeaders

After spending several hours, I used Wireshark and found that my requests are being changed by this extension, without any straightforward way for me to know what happened.

Postman does not do such a thing. The Console transparently shows the raw version of what has been sent to a server.

I suggest this matter be addressed.

[bohdan-kolomiiets]

@Huachao , thanks for you work and this extension!

@asmith3006 , thanks for you recommendation, it helped!

But, I would not agree that this recommendation is the solution of root problem. Other peole still will face this problem, spending some time wondering what is going on, and only then start google the problem.

Doumentation does not specifies that setting "rest-client.previewOption": "exchange" shows all headers and does not hide any of them. In description, it is written “Preview the whole HTTP exchange(request and response)”. From this description I don’t get that before some headers were hidden and with this value they will become visible.

I use this extensions to debug back-end calls, and cookies are used in many places. Because of this default behavior to save previously set cookies, I have made wrong assumptions about nature of the bug and spent several hours debugging, and onlythen I realized that something wrong with extensions’ behavior.

@Huachao , why you decided to make to make option “rest-client.rememberCookiesForSubsequentRequests” default value to be “true”. Has any surver been conducted and users voted that they need more browser-like behaviour?

I would propose

1. show all headers sent and received (presence of all headers is one of the reasones why people use Fiddler, and your extension too, I suppose).
2. make option “rest-client.rememberCookiesForSubsequentRequests” default value to be “false”. It is a well know rule that “explicit is better than implicit”.

[asmith3006]

Does this help?

Change setting: “rest-client.previewOption”: “exchange”

Then you get (I believe) the full sent request.

Also, you can disable the Cookies: “rest-client.rememberCookiesForSubsequentRequests”: false

I’m assuming the cookies is enabled so you can do authentication and pass the cookies in subsequent calls easier. Personally I’ve turned this off to make each call explicit.