Speaker: Pooja Mistry
Twitter: @poojamakes
Public workspace- https://www.postman.com/devrel/workspace/2023-10-postman-features-everyone-should-know/overview
For more, see the table of contents.
Notes
- Moving towards an API first world
- Postman started in 2012 with a Chrome extension. Evolved into full API platform
- More than just sending requests – ex: collections, documentation, servers
- Web and app versions
- Newman – CLI for postman
- Collections, env vars, queries, etc have own id
- Different life cycle for two personnas: producer of APIs (define, design, developer, test, secure, deploy, observe, distribute) an consumer of APIs (discover, evaluate, integrate, test, deploy, observe)
- Test tab to test the API. Example – pm.test(“assert text”, function () {}
- Protocols – graphql, websocket, grpc, socket io, etc
- Scripts – can run before and after graphql
- Pre-request script – ex: debugging
- Can pass in $randomXXX of various types in your postman call
Postman API
- Sign in and fork workspace if want to play with the public workspace for this talk
- Postman has own API. ex: CRUD for collections, envs etc
- Some clients use collection as the deliverable and then get metrics on it.
Postman echo
- Sends back whatever you send in.
- When pass in get params sends back json with args map being your params.
- Post sends the text back as the data key in json.
- Always echos headers as well
Postman visualizer
- Can build UI in postman
- Visualize tab on result. Put pm.visualizer.set(template, response: pm.response.json() in test tab.
- Can use to make charts, maps, csv, etc
- The template is HTML (which can contain JavaScript)
- Postman provides a library of templates that you an copy/paste
- Also see https://learning.postman.com/docs/sending-requests/visualizer/ and https://www.postman.com/postman/workspace/more-visualizer-examples/overview
Built in Libraries
- Can automatically use faker,js, lodash, moment.js, chai.js and cryto-js
- Ex: lodash.functionName()
Workflow Control
- Scripting allows oops and conditionals
- postman.setNextRequest() lets you change the order of requests in a collection
- pm.sendRequest() allows sending multiple APIs at once
- Collection and environment variables let you communicate between APIs
Mock Servers
- Create a mock server in UI
- This gives you a URL
- Can deactivate mock server
- Set data to return
Code Generation
- Includes Java, curl, Node.JS, etc for requests
- For providers, less choices but still a number
Test Automation
- Bread and butter of postman
- Can run manually
- Can schedule API runs
- Can report on results of API over time – ex: monitoring
- Can use Newman and generate how to run CLI on other CICD: ex: Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Gitlab, etc
- New: June 15 – can do performance testing using desktop client. Gives response time graph
Flows
- Visual diagram showing order/connection/variables.
- Can include dashboards in flow
Docs
- Markdown syntax: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
- Can embed images
- If documented well, can share with others
- Explore tab shows all public APIs across Postman. Best ones are well documented.
- Can include link to show what person/company created.
- Can have creator workspace and aggregate your collections
- Get help at – community.postman.com
Can try most for free. CLI not free
My take
I like that she used Postman (a public collection) and demos for most of the presentation. A lot of the features described were new to me. Excellent start to the morning.