what is postman?
Postman is an API testing tool. You can hit the API via postman and see if you are getting the desired results. API stands for Application Programming Interface. In this blog I will list some of the most used features of the postman.
Collection: You can add all of your APIs of single type in a particular folder under collections. You can perform multiple type of requests (GET, PUT, POST , PATCH etc) on a single API.
Import: you can import existing APIs using import function that come with Postman. You can even import curl queries using raw-text under import section. There are various ways to import an API. Please refer to image for clear understanding.
Environment: You can change the environment according to your needs. You can find various settings to choose from. You usually need to add values according to the data (variable, initial value, current value) etc. Your API will depend on the environment in which it is running. You may want to have different environments for different types of situations. By default the environment is global. Once you have the new environment , you also need to make sure that you are running your API in appropriate environment (available on the right top corner).
Authorization: There are various authorization methods that are available, but out of them “basic authorization” is most common, sometimes access tokens are used to validate the API request.
Body: Body is most widely used when doing a put or patch request. You can find various types of data options under Body like: raw data (JSON), binary, form-data etc.
Header: It takes parameters as key-value pair. Header content is most widely used to filter out the data according to the need of person who is reqursting the data. Sometimes, However you need to put specific data under data if you want to retrieve the data, otherwise you can not access the data.
Params: Parameters or query parameters are used to filter out the data received from the API and to get the specific data that is desired. We can pass various parameters to sort, filter and show only the desired data like we can show only 100 enteries per page, we can get the single record based on the id etc.
Mock-servers: You can use mock-servers if you want to simulate a real server. You can create your own end-points to get, post or update the data without actually having a backend for that.