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

Designing an API

I have talked about a lot of the theory of API design, so now I want to look at how you can use Postman to help you out with designing an API. API design does not only apply to new APIs that you create. In fact, using the principles of API design when testing an existing API is a great way to find potential threats to the value of that API, but for the sake of understanding this better, let's look at how you can design an API from scratch. If you understand the principles through this kind of example, you should be able to use them on existing APIs as well.

Case study – Designing an e-commerce API

Let's imagine that we want to design an API for a very simple e-commerce application. This application has a few products that you can look at. It also allows users to create a profile that they can use when adding item to their cart and purchasing them. The purpose of this API is to expose the data in a way that can be used by both the web and mobile...