Postman

Using the Postman tool to independently test ReST API's.

It is generally 'best practice' to test the back-end ReST API before linking this to a client-side application. This is usually done by the developers of the ReST API who supply these tests to the front-end team as part of their integration documentation.

The most well known tool for this is called Postman.

Collections

ReST API developers will normally create a Postman collection, which is a folder containing all of the published ReST API functions:

This is our Postman collection for the restdb.io ReST API from the previous page. We can see the API functions on the left and the 'environment' top right which is where the security credentials are stored for this specific collection. We tested this specific endpoint and it returned the JSON data.

Environments

Each collection is usually associated with an environment which is where the security credentials are stored and used as environment variables in the URL, or headers or body of the request.

Testing

Of course the principal benefit in using Postman is to be able to test the ReST API's independently, another important separation of concerns. This allows a quality assurance (QA) team to sign off that the ReST API is both functional and performant before it is integrated into Flexiva.