Book Image

API Testing and Development with Postman

By : Dave Westerveld
1 (1)
Book Image

API Testing and Development with Postman

1 (1)
By: Dave Westerveld

Overview of this book

Postman enables the exploration and testing of web APIs, helping testers and developers figure out how an API works. With Postman, you can create effective test automation for any APIs. If you want to put your knowledge of APIs to work quickly, this practical guide to using Postman will help you get started. The book provides a hands-on approach to learning the implementation and associated methodologies that will have you up and running with Postman in no time. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book begins by taking you through the principles of effective API testing. A combination of theory coupled with real-world examples will help you learn how to use Postman to create well-designed, documented, and tested APIs. You'll then be able to try some hands-on projects that will teach you how to add test automation to an already existing API with Postman, and guide you in using Postman to create a well-designed API from scratch. By the end of this book, you'll be able to use Postman to set up and run API tests for any API that you are working with.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: API Testing Theory and Terminology
6
Section 2: Using Postman When Working with an Existing API
13
Section 3: Using Postman to Develop an API

Creating an API specification

I want to keep this practical for you, so in this chapter we are going to walk through the process of creating an API specification from scratch. In order to do this, we will create a specification for the API of an imaginary to-do list application. I want you to imagine that you are going to create the API for an application that can create and display items on a to-do list. This application will allow users to create new to-do items. It will also allow users to mark those items as complete and to make changes to the item after they have created it. They can also delete an item that they no longer want to track.

Our job in this chapter will be to create an API specification that lays out exactly what this API is going to look like. We will then look at how we can use this specification in Postman to create an API and set up tests for it. For the work we are doing here, you don't need to worry about what the user interface will look like.

The...