The other day, I was trying to use the ServerXMLHTTP object. For information, this object was created to allow you to establish server-to-server HTTP connections.

The code I firstly wrote looked like the following:

Dim oXMLHTTP
Set oXMLHTTP = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP")
oXMLHTTP.open "POST", sURL, false
oXMLHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
oXMLHTTP.send sParams
Response.Write oXMLHTTP.responseText

with sURL the URL to call and sParams the parameters to send with the URL.

The problem was that oXMLHTTP.responseText didn’t return anything. Or to be exact, it returned an empty string, which was obviously not the expected response… 🙁

After some investigation, it appeared that the problem was because the server was seating behind a proxy. All this is good and well, but the question now is how to tell the application to use the proxy?

First of all, the ServerXMLHTTP object has a setProxy method:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms760236(v=VS.85).aspx
So I tried to add the following line to the previous code:

oXMLHTTP.setProxy 2, "myProxyServer:80", ""

Unfortunately, this didn’t fix the problem. It looks like this line is simply ignored. If somebody knows why, please tell me! 😉

So the solution I finally adopted was to configure the proxy through the proxycfg tool.
There are two ways of using this tool:

• Import the proxy settings from the current user’s Microsoft Internet Explorer manual settings using the command proxycfg.exe -u
• Configure the proxy settings manually using the command proxycfg -p myProxyServer:80

This last solution works for me and I hope it will help a few people. 🙂

PS: I found the following page when writing this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289481/. It would have been so good to find it during my investigation but anyway.