Author: kristinjackvony

New API testers will often be mystified by the assortment of curly braces, colons, and commas that they see in the body of the response to their GET requests.  Trying to create a valid JSON body for a POST request is even more puzzling.  In this week’s post, I’ll discuss how JSON data is formed […]

Last week, we talked about running API tests from the command line using Newman, and how to add Newman into your Continuous Integration system so that your API tests run automatically.  But knowing how to run your tests isn’t that helpful unless you make good choices about what tests to run, and when to run […]

Running a test collection in Postman is a great way to test your APIs quickly.  But an even faster way to run your tests is to run them automatically!  In order to automate your Postman tests, we first need to learn how to run them from the command line. Newman is the command-line running tool […]

One of the things that makes me happy about API testing is how easy it is to organize tests and environment variables.  I love having test suites ready at a moment’s notice; to run at the push of a button when regression testing is needed, or to run automatically as part of continuous integration. This […]

This week, we’ll be talking about the many ways to use variables in Postman. We’ll be using the collection that we created a few weeks ago, so you may want to check that tutorial out before reading on. The first thing to understand about variables in Postman is that they are organized into environments. A […]

This week, we’ll be talking about adding assertions to our Postman requests.  In last week’s post, we discussed what various API request responses mean, and how to write assertions for them in Postman requests.  Now we’ll be adding some more assertions that will test our requests more fully.  We will be using the Postman collection […]

If you have ever made a REST request or looked in the developer tools section of a browser, you have likely seen the three-digit response code that is returned with an HTTP request.  This week, we’ll be talking about the different types of response codes you might receive when doing API testing, and what those […]

This week we’ll be finishing up our discussion of REST request types with an introduction to the DELETE request and how to test it.  We will also be looking at how to chain REST tests together in a Postman collection. A DELETE request removes an entire record from a database table.  To see a DELETE […]

Like PUT requests, PATCH requests modify an existing record.  But PATCH requests are much tricker to test!  This is because a PUT request modifies an entire record, whereas a PATCH request modifies only one part of the record.  There are many different operations that you can do within a PATCH request: you can add, replace, […]

In last week’s blog post, we discussed how to create and test POST requests.  This week, we will tackle testing PUT requests.  A PUT request is actually very similar to a POST request; the major difference is that POST requests are intended to create a new record, and PUT requests are intended to replace an […]