I have run into issues while performance testing Flex Applications where sometimes the AMF responses come back in binary format instead of more readable XML format.  Actually in one case the binary data was even base64 encoded and presented by silk performer ( in this case just disable the  option to transform the flex responses to xml format in your active profile). 

As always you need to parse responses to extract useful information which you can then use in subsequent calls. The problem is the binary data contains nulls and all kinds of  non ascii characters.  How do you deal with those. The following simple  function will replace all the null and non printable characters to printable ascii string.  You need to pass in the source binary string and the character you want as a replacement for non printable characters . Call could be like this:  binToAscii ( src, “+”); . Now you have a simple ascii string and you can extract whatever strings you want to extract ( object_ids, guids etc..).

function binToAscii( src : string ; printChar :string )
  var
      len : number;
      i:number;
      tmp : string;
  begin
     len := binlen(src);
     for  i:=1 to len do
         GetMem(src,i,tmp,1);
         if ( bin(tmp) = "h00" ) then
             SetMem(src,i,printChar,1);
         elseif  (ord(tmp[1]) < 32 ) or (( ord(tmp[1]) >= 127) and ( ord(tmp[1]) <= 144)) or (( ord(tmp[1]) >= 147) and ( ord(tmp[1]) <= 159))then
             SetMem(src,i,printChar,1);
         end;
     end;
  end binToAscii;

Tags: amf, amf3, ascii, binary, borland, flex, linkedin, parsing, response, segue, silk performer, xml

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 11:09 am and is filed under Load Testing Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.