How to update Postman collections when new requests get updated by developer to the api

Question

I have my API's document in Swagger which have different endpoints or request. I used the swagger.json link from my API's in Swagger to import them to Postman as collections and then add test cases there.

But I am confused on one thing that if the developers add more requests to the API how can I import the new request without impacting the test cases.

For e.g.:
In one case I have one API with 65 requests that I imported from Swagger UI and test cases written. Then after few days I used the same link to import and number of requests changed to 69 which means 4 new request got added but Postman replaced the whole collection with test cases gone.

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered May 11 '18 at 08:23

As posted in a related question, there is no straightforward solution for now. All you can do now is merging the requests outside of Postman. After all, Postman collections are really just JSON data and can be manipulated as such.

Export your old requests to a collection file 2.0 or newer
Export your new collection the same way
Merge the two JSON files.
Import the new file back to Postman.

I made myself a simple manual helper for step 3 (see the code below), but it can be easily automated in a scripting language of your preference. Steps 1, 2 and 4 can be automated with Newman.

function execute() {
  collection = JSON.parse($(".collection").val());
  swagger = JSON.parse($(".swagger").val());
  result = JSON.stringify($.extend(true, {}, swagger, collection));
  $(".result").val(result);
}

<html><body>
  <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
  <br>Collection: <br> <textarea class="collection"></textarea>
  <br>Swagger: <br> <textarea class="swagger"></textarea>
  <br>Result: <br> <textarea class="result"></textarea>
  <br>
  <button onClick="execute()">EXECUTE</button>
</body></html>

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 05 '17 at 15:16

I would be interested if there was an automatic process for this but I'm afraid it does not exists. You'll have to import your JSON as a duplicate (it is proposed by Postman, as your collection already exists) and then duplicate the new requests and integrate them into your current collection. It may be a real pain if a lot of updates occurred.

It could be more realistic to export your current collection in JSON, diff the two files with a diff tool in order to add the new requests in a few manipulations, then reimport your own JSON file ... That's what I would do.

Alex

How to update Postman collections when new requests get updated by developer to the api

2 Answers2