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Let's see how we can use a tool called Postman to interactively test our API.
Follow Along
To follow along committing your changes to this course, you'll need to fork the aspnet-fitness-frog-spa repo. Then you can clone, commit, and push your changes to your fork like this:
git clone <your-fork>
cd aspnet-fitness-frog-spa
git checkout tags/v2.4 -b using-postman
Postman
For more information about Postman, including installers and a complete list of features, see getpostman.com.
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When developing an API, it's helpful to have a way to test without having to
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use a client application that consumes your API.
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Let's see how we can use a tool called Postman to interactively test our API.
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Postman is a native application available for MAC OS, Windows, and Linux.
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For instructions on how to download and
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install Postman see their website, getpostman.com.
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I already have Postman installed on my machine.
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To make a get request, you enter a URL and click the send button.
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But first, let's start our application in Visual Studio.
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Set break points in both the get action methods and start the application.
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Once the application has started, make note of the port number in the URL,
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or simply select the URL, and copy it to the clipboard.
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Visual Studio randomly sets this number for your project, so
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your port number will most likely be different than the one you see here.
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In Postman, for the request URL enter http://localhost
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followed by the port number for your application.
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Or if you copied the URL to the clipboard like I did, simply paste the URL
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into this field and remove the pound sign slash entries.
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Then after the port number enter,
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api/entries and click the send button.
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Here we are in Visual Studio at our break point in our first get action method.
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Press F5 to continue execution and switch back to Postman.
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And here's the response data formatted as JSON displayed
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in the bottom section of the current tab.
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Now let's try retrieving a single entry resource.
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To do that, just add a 1 after the /API/entries path and
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click the Send button.
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And here we are in Visual Studio again.
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This time we're at our break point in the second get action method.
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Press F5 to continue execution and switch back to Postman.
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We aren't returning any data from our method, so
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there isn't any data to display here in Postman.
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We'll finish implementing our get methods in the next session.
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Later in this section, we'll see how to make requests that contain a message body,
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for example, a post request to create a resource.
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Here on the left,
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under the History section, we can see a history of the requests that we've made.
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Here's our first and second get requests.
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We can click on the first get request and
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click the send button to make the request against the server again.
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We'll continue to use Postman to test our API throughout the rest of the course.
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We're just scratching the surface of what Postman is capable of doing.
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See the teacher's notes for more information about Postman.
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Looking at the response data for our first get request again,
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how did the data that we returned from our controller action method get converted, or
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serialized, to JSON formatted data?
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Coming up next, we'll take a look at a feature called content negotiation and
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learn how Web API serializes our data.
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See you then.
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