Creative Workflow Hacks

One of the things I noticed while experimenting with the After Effects Socket object was that my Apache Server logs showed the User-Agent for my requests as “_” which I think is the Apache equivalent of null. While not really a problem while we are experimenting, it’s always a good idea to be a good citizen of the net as a developer. If we were to ingest a web service with the After Effects socket like so it would be the equivalent of knocking on a door with a mask on.

I didn’t see any reference to User-Agent in the After Effects Scripting Guide so I dug around a bit. User-Agent is simply a line in the GET or POST http request. Since we are crafting our http request line by line we can just add a reference to our project like so…

webConnect.write('GET /socketDemo/sampleProject.json HTTP/1.0  \\nUser-Agent: OurFantasticAfterEffectsWebService(http://creative-workflow-hacks.com)\\n\\n');

What might be more common is an internal web service. In that case we might use system.machineName as the User-Agent like so…

var machine = system.machineName;
var request = "GET /socketDemo/sampleProject.json HTTP/1.0  \\nUser-Agent: " + machine + "\\n\\n";
webConnect.write(request);

We could then use our web server logs to trace which internal machine requested a particular service at a particular time.

Problem solved. I haven’t done a lot of work with raw HTTP requests and there is a ton of stuff in the HTTP spec so I know I’ll be doing some more reading as I dig deeper into using After Effects like this.