Vision
Fiddler and FrontPage RPC calls
May 18, 2006
In our previous post, we discussed Fiddler, a tool for monitoring HTTP traffic. Yesterday, Fiddler came in handy. We wanted to call a FrontPage RPC method on MOSS 2007. FrontPage RPC methods and arguments are passed to the server via the body of a HTTP POST request. As a part of a FrontPage RPC call you need to pass the method name and server extension version. We believe the SharePoint 2003 documentation mentions the correct version of FrontPage RPC on SharePoint 2003 is version number 6.0.2.5523, although SharePad uses the following hard coded version number: 6.0.2.5614.
We wanted to find out the exact version number we should pass to FrontPage Server Extensions on MOSS 2007. If you have access to the SharePoint 2007 SDKs, you probably have noticed that large portions of it are not updated yet. So, the documentation was not the answer. Instead, we used Fiddler. We browsed to a SharePoint page and opened the page in SharePoint Designer (a successor of FrontPage 2003). SharePoint Designer makes extensive use of FrontPage RPC, so all we had to do was monitor the HTTP traffic in Fiddler. The following screenshot shows what we found.
Looking at the HTTP traffic, we found a FrontPage RPC method call that looked like this:
url+to+web+url%3a12%2e0%2e0%2e3820&url=%2fPages%2fDefault%2easpx&flags=0
This call is still encoded. Unencoded, it’s easier to read:
url+to+web+url:12.0.0.3820&url=/Pages/Default.aspx&flags=0
Ergo, the correct version number we need to pass to FrontPage Server Extensions is 12.0.0.3820.