Using Postman

When developing an API, it's helpful to have a way to test without having to 0:00 use a client application that consumes your API. 0:04 Let's see how we can use a tool called Postman to interactively test our API. 0:08 Postman is a native application available for MAC OS, Windows, and Linux. 0:13 For instructions on how to download and 0:19 install Postman see their website, getpostman.com. 0:22 I already have Postman installed on my machine. 0:25 To make a get request, you enter a URL and click the send button. 0:28 But first, let's start our application in Visual Studio. 0:34 Set break points in both the get action methods and start the application. 0:38 Once the application has started, make note of the port number in the URL, 0:57 or simply select the URL, and copy it to the clipboard. 1:03 Visual Studio randomly sets this number for your project, so 1:07 your port number will most likely be different than the one you see here. 1:10 In Postman, for the request URL enter http://localhost 1:15 followed by the port number for your application. 1:21 Or if you copied the URL to the clipboard like I did, simply paste the URL 1:25 into this field and remove the pound sign slash entries. 1:30 Then after the port number enter, 1:36 api/entries and click the send button. 1:40 Here we are in Visual Studio at our break point in our first get action method. 1:48 Press F5 to continue execution and switch back to Postman. 1:53 And here's the response data formatted as JSON displayed 1:58 in the bottom section of the current tab. 2:01 Now let's try retrieving a single entry resource. 2:06 To do that, just add a 1 after the /API/entries path and 2:09 click the Send button. 2:14 And here we are in Visual Studio again. 2:19 This time we're at our break point in the second get action method. 2:21 Press F5 to continue execution and switch back to Postman. 2:26 We aren't returning any data from our method, so 2:30 there isn't any data to display here in Postman. 2:33 We'll finish implementing our get methods in the next session. 2:36 Later in this section, we'll see how to make requests that contain a message body, 2:40 for example, a post request to create a resource. 2:45 Here on the left, 2:48 under the History section, we can see a history of the requests that we've made. 2:49 Here's our first and second get requests. 2:54 We can click on the first get request and 2:57 click the send button to make the request against the server again. 2:59 We'll continue to use Postman to test our API throughout the rest of the course. 3:06 We're just scratching the surface of what Postman is capable of doing. 3:11 See the teacher's notes for more information about Postman. 3:15 Looking at the response data for our first get request again, 3:18 how did the data that we returned from our controller action method get converted, or 3:22 serialized, to JSON formatted data? 3:27 Coming up next, we'll take a look at a feature called content negotiation and 3:31 learn how Web API serializes our data. 3:35 See you then. 3:39