Installing POSTMAN and making our first Rest API Call

Without wasting any time further, lets go to https://www.postman.com/downloads/ and click on windows installer. You can choose x64/x32 based on your PC config. Open your folder where file has been downloaded and click on Postman-wind64-9.15.2.Setup.exe {can be different in your case}. Installation is pretty easy and straight forward, just follow the steps and click next until you reach finish.

One important part is create your free account on POSTMAN. So that later you can sign-in and save your progress automatically. This helps us in case we need to re-install POSTMAN then we just need to sign-in and all are workspace with collections get loaded automatically.

 

Now Create your workspace and make it private!

 

From the left menu select Collections-> Now click on “”+” button and enter name as “AnAPIofIceAndFire”. Now add a request by right clicking on the collection and select “add request”, enter url as https://anapioficeandfire.com/api/books  and names the request as “Get Books”. So this is your endpoint.

The action that we are doing is GET as we want to inquire about books or want information on all available books.

In our example this means that we are not using any query parameters instead using only request parameters. In this case it is books.

 

 

 

Final step click Send [blue button]. This will give you response containing all the books with related properties like name, isbn, authors etc.

 

 

Now lets try another scenario where we will have query parameter included. For this make a copy of above request, name the request as “Get Book” and change the endpoint as “api/books/1”. Now click on Send button again.

You will notice that now response time was less than previous and we received one book details. The response we are receiving is in json format which is then projected in “pretty view” in postman. By Default its shown in Pretty view to make it more readable.

 

Well this was just a good start for us to feel comfortable with POSTMAN. This does not mean we cannot do more with it. Lets explore more in our next tutorial- https://wp.me/pa3gHG-vi