Request reuse in Postman

Question

Our team wants to automate our REST API testing. Right now, we have a collection of Postman requests and make them jump through hoops manually.

We could create a collection/folder for each testing scenario, but that would mean a ton of duplication. Our API is still under heavy development and I really don't want to fix the same thing at twenty places after it changes.

I would like to have each endpoint request only once in a collection and some kind of independent logic that can execute them in an arbitrary order. I know Postman doesn't support request reuse in any clean way, so I am looking for at least a hacky way how to do it.

Are the collection and sub-folder elements of use to you. These were introduced to stop repeating the same thing over and over in your request and extract that out to a central area. It won’t solve all of your use case but might help - http://blog.getpostman.com/2017/12/13/keep-it-dry-with-collection-and-folder-elements/ — Danny Dainton, May 11 '18 at 18:12

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered May 21 '18 at 13:04

Create a file to load into the Postman Collection Runner, with the following structure:

[{
    "testSequence": ["First request name", "Second request name", "..." ],
    "anyOtherData":  "Whatever the request needs",
    "evenMoreData":  "Whatever the request needs",
    "...":           "..."
},{
    "testSequence": ["Login", "Check newsfeed", "Send a picture", "Logout" ],
    "username":  "Example",
    "password":  "correcthorsebatterystaple",
},{
    "...": "keep the structure for any other test scenario or request sequence"
}]

Put all your test sequences in that file, then make Postman check the list after each request and decide what to execute next. This can be done e. g. in a "tests block" of the whole collection:

// Use the mechanism only if there is a test scenario file
// This IF prevents the block from firing when running single requests in Postman
if (pm.iterationData.get("testSequence")) {

    // Is there another request in the scenario?
    var sequence = pm.globals.get("testSequence");
    if ((sequence instanceof Array) && (sequence.length > 0)) {

        // If so, set it as the next one
        var nextRequest = sequence.shift();
        pm.globals.set("testSequence", sequence);
        postman.setNextRequest(nextRequest);

    } else {
        // Otherwise, this was the last one. Finish the execution.
        postman.setNextRequest(null);
    }
}

If your requests need to use different data during different runs, you can define the data in the input file and use them as variables in the request.

The only way to run JavaScript code is to do a request. So I'll need to do a unrelated request that executes the JavaScript to get the test sequence loaded and the "first" request of the sequence set. Did you ever found a more graceful way of handling this without the need for a extra request? — PixelPlex, Feb 03 '21 at 22:10
We usually ran something without side effects as the first request, like **/ping** . It's not very elegant, but gets the job done. — Martin Grey, Feb 12 '21 at 12:32
Hi, I ended up doing something similar. My first and last request just load google. I use them as test startup and teardown where I do some logging, set/unset collection variables, etc... I hope Postman allows running js separate from the requests some day though — PixelPlex, Feb 13 '21 at 13:58

Request reuse in Postman

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