You might be familiar with using the Postman Collection Runner to run a collection over multiple variables using a CSV file. But what about situations where you don’t know the data in advance? For example, let’s say you want to test an item info API with all the current items. First you need to get the list of items, then call the info API with each item. So you don’t want to loop the entire collection, just the item info request. The postman.sendNextRequest function can help you do just that. Continue reading “Postman How-to: Dynamic Iteration Within a Collection” →

Back in the spring of 2016 I did my very first talk for STPCon. It was about testing REST services and I mentioned Postman as a good tool for exploring services; saying in passing, “I could probably do a whole talk just on Postman”. Since then I have done multiple talks and workshops on the Postman tool, so when I saw that Postman the company was doing its first ever conference in essentially my backyard, I had to throw my hat in the ring as a speaker.

I was pretty excited about this conference both as a chance to meet the Postman team and also because it would be my first time stepping out of the test conference bubble and meeting with a whole different group of people. In that regard, POST/CON 2018 definitely lived up to my expectations. I had a great time talking with people from all sorts of different roles, not just testing. Below is a brief overview of the program with some highlights: Continue reading “POST/CON 2018” →

Postman is a great tool for exploratory testing and the Big List of Naughty Strings (BLNS) is a great resource for exploratory testing, so I wanted to put the two things together into a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of tasty test flavor.

Step One: Getting the Naughty Strings

My plan was to use the Collection Runner to put each naughty string into my chosen API parameter. To do that, I would need a list of strings in a csv format. The BLNS repo includes a couple files with the strings encoded as base64, which is necessary for the csv parser, so my first quick and dirty solution was just to cut and paste the strings from blns.base64.json into a text file, slap a header on top and save it as a csv. Continue reading “Testing with Naughty Strings in Postman” →