I like using Wireshark to have a look at the traffic going across different interfaces but because it shows what’s happening across the wire by the packet it’s quite difficult to tell what a request/response looked like.

I’ve been playing around with restfulie/http://vraptor.caelum.com.br/[Vraptor] today so I wanted to be able to see the request/response pair when something wasn’t working.

I didn’t know it was actually possible but this post on StackOverflow describes how.

First we need to select the row which contains any part of our request/response - in this case I just selected the row representing the request - and then we go to the Analyze menu and click 'Follow TCP Stream':

We can then see the requests/responses which happened all next to each other:

The keyboard shortcut to get to that menu is 'Alt-A F' but for some reason the 'Alt' key wasn’t working for me by default so I had to follow the instructions on Francis North’s blog to get it working.