I absolutely love Omnibug (the add-on for Firebug). So simple, yet so beautiful little tool for testing/debugging Adobe Analytics taggings (or any other analytics tool). Just realized the one big advantage is that Omnibug is included in Firebug and with Firebug you can also easily check many other analytics related stuff (cookies, requests, debug javascript etc) on your website.
However, I was puzzled this week when I was testing new default code for Adobe Analytics (by using Charles Proxy Tool) and nothing was sent on one of the pages. I thought the new s_code was broken or something, but luckily I got help from my boss and we noticed that the hit is actually sent but for some reason Omnibug isn’t showing it. I used Google and I found the answer from here https://github.com/simpsora/omnibug/issues/18. So the reason is that on certain pages the analytics hit/url is so long that Adobe will send the hit using http post and not get method. Let’s wait if Omnibug makes the update to include post request, but the initial comment was that it is going be difficult, but we’ll see…
Adobe did make announcment about this, but who remembers this kind of technical stuff? 😉 And here is the official comment from Adobe:
AppMeasurement for JavaScript and Flash now send image requests using POST in some circumstances to avoid request truncation that occurs at 2000 bytes in some browsers. After this update, Internet Explorer 8+ will no longer truncate request data at 2000 bytes, reducing errors and data loss for some variables. For example, if the browser is Internet Explorer 9 and the image URL is 1900 bytes, then the request is sent using HTTP GET. If it is 2100 bytes, the request is sent using HTTP POST. Note that the Adobe Debugger does not inspect hits sent using HTTP POST. If the Adobe Debugger doesn’t show data in Internet Explorer, use a packet analyzer or the built-in network tools to examine the network traffic directly, or inspect the hit in a browser that does not truncate URLs, such as Chrome or Firefox. This functionality requires AppMeasurement for JavaScript 1.4.1+ and the visitor ID service 1.3.2+.
Source: https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/whatsnew/09182014.html
I also found nice blog post about this “issue” and how you can make a detour for this new setting: (But I would recommend to use the trick just for testing/debugging purposes)
http://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/validating-adobe-analytics-http-posted-tags-pain-relief-formula/ I ain’t Justin, but I clap for you too Stewart, fantastic blog post about this issue!
So the result is, you can use packet analyzers to get also post request, HTTPFox and Charles Proxy Tool are my favorites. However, I’m going to continue to use Omnibug and for special cases I can use packet analyzer.
Adobe Analytics Debugger Chrome extension shows POST and GET requests!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adobe-analytics-debugger/bdingoflfadhnjohjaplginnpjeclmof/support?hl=en
Enjoy!
Thanks for the tip Tomas!