Drag and Drop of folders into other folders isn't working even when folders are empty?

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Hi, I am trying to reorganize the various tests that we have in folders representing each site/location, into customer named subfolders for better organization. Postman supports multi select in the Collections sidebar on the left, so I thought I could just click select all the folders I wanted, and then drag them into the new customer subfolders I created. The interface acts like it’s going to allow this, it shows that I have X folders selected (when multi-selecting) and when hovering mouse over the destination folder before releasing click, it shows it selects it. Everything to me acts like it’s about to move those folders into the subfolder upon mouse click release based on typical Windows app behavior. But when I let go, nothing happens. There’s no error or message, it just simply doesn’t move them.

I searched this group for this issue, saw old posts before multi-select was added but nothing on this specifically that I saw. I saw a lot of posts had requested screen recordings though, so I made this one of this issue so you can see what I mean. I mad two tests folders and blurred out our customers:

I thought maybe this is because it won’t move non-empty folders? So I tried dragging all the tests out of the folder first, before dragging and dropping, but no change. It’s as if it refuses to allow you to nest folders through drag and drop. Which is unusual, because it allows me to manually create the subfolders underneath, and then drag / drop the tests after into the new subfolder just fine. So drag/drop of tests works, and you can nest subfolders - just not via drag and drop?

To me this all looks like a bug? The functionality seems 90% there to the point it makes me think this might not be intentional? It’s been this way in at least the last two versions and I don’t recall if this ever worked prior.

First post instructions say to tag @danny-dainton ? Thanks.

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Hi @mindexjim :waving_hand:. Welcome to the Postman Community :postman:

I am not able to replicate this behaviour on my end. I’m on Mac OS, Postman Desktop v11.58.3, and I am able to select and move multiple folders with drag and drop.

What version of Postman are you on?

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Hello @gbadebo-bello - I am currently using Postman version 11.59.0, which I believe is the latest version? Just verified it still happens in this version. It’s the x64 flavor, for win32 10.0.19045 (Windows 10). All of my colleagues here use Windows machines, none of us have Mac’s to see if our shared collections in our workspace would work differently on Mac. As noted this has been a problem for quite a few versions at least - I don’t remember drag and drop of folders ever working in Postman in at least the past few years. It’s not just multi-select of folders, dragging / dropping even single folders in the sidebar doesn’t work as shown in the video.

It’s not unique to my computer either, my colleagues and I all share the same collections via our Team in Postman, we are using a paid Professional (Annual) plan. We all have the same issue.

Perhaps this is related to the number of tests and collections we have in our workspace? Perhaps we’ve hit some kind of limit and it’s causing a hidden error? I don’t know if you can see the details of our workspace, fom the backend on your end? But our team is: schooltool-486929.postman.co and the Workspace in question is named CloudOps

Let me know what other info you’d like from me to help you see and reproduce this? Logs, etc? Could even do a screen share etc. I would love to get this fixed as there is a bunch of organization of our collections I want to do that having this fixed would make so much easier! Thanks!

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Hi @mindexjim.

Thank you for sharing more context. I am following up with the team internally to understand if this is a known issue with Windows machines and know how best to help resolve this.

I’ll be back :crossed_fingers:.

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Hi @mindexjim. Can you please share the following with me at [email protected]?

  • Your application logs
  • Collection and Workspace IDs
  • Email you’re logged in with

Thank you!

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Hello @gbadebo-bello,

I’ve sent the requested info to your email with a link to this thread in case you need to search for it / yank it out of a spam folder etc. Let me know what I can do next to assist.

Thank you,
-Jim

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Hi @mindexjim,

I’ve received the email and we’re looking into this. You’ll hear back soon.

Thank you!

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This thread went dead because the conversation was moved into an internal support ticket ID: 261377.

Unfortunately, support confirmed that what I’m asking for, is currently not possible and unsupported, despite the application making it look like it should work.

Specifically, drag and drop of collections is not supported. Though they work and look no different than Folders in this context, drag and drop of Folders works, but Collections don’t. From an enduser standpoint this distinction is meaningless, and the way the app behaves is inconsistent and confusing. At the very least, it shouldn’t act like drag and drop of Collections works, when it isn’t. But really, there needs to be a way to mass move Collections or change Collections into Folders, something to that effect.

I asked for this to be submitted as a feature request, and the ticket was closed. I do think this should be prioritized as the current behavior straight up looks like a bug, particularly to someone like me with decades of experience with Windows applications from both sides of the fence (working at the company who made it vs being an enduser).

At any rate I wanted it to be clear to any other users having this issue or that find this thread, that this is not being considered a bug but instead is a feature request for currently unsupported functionality. :frowning:

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9

Hey @mindexjim :waving_hand:

Just following up here - There is an open feature request for this Collection into another Collection type functionality here:

For me, Collections and Folders are distinct elements in Postman. A Collection serves as a container for Folders, Requests, Examples, and other items much like how a Workspace contains all the elements within it.

Folders can be moved between Collections because you’re simply moving them into another container (a different Collection).

Agreed that the UI can make it seem like you should be able to move a Collection into another Collection. However, there’s no visual indicator that supports this action because it’s not currently possible. The drag behavior for Collections exists mainly to support dropping them into a Runner instance.

When dragging a Folder to another Collection or Folder, you’ll see an indicator showing that it can be dropped there.

I agree that this could be a really useful feature. However, there are a few complexities that would make it more than a simple operation.

That’s not to say it will never be possible it’s just not something Postman supports at the moment.

How would you envision this working in terms of mapping?
For example, if both Collections have summaries or documentation at that level, which one should take precedence? Should the existing content be appended to the new one, or merged in some way?

There are also other considerations: parent authorization settings might differ, which could affect dependencies like Monitors, Mocks, or CI/CD pipelines. Then there’s the question of how to handle duplicate variables, tests, or scripts.

Personally, I think there’s a lot more to consider than simply moving one Collection into another, as it involves several layers of dependencies and potential conflicts.

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Thank you for the link to the GitHub request, you’re the first person to mention it, i’ll reply there as well since they were looking for a more recent update to the issue and I have the video above.

We don’t even use such features, so that’s not a concern of ours. For us, there is no difference between collections and folders, in fact, until support got back to me on this, I did not even realize that there was a distinction between them in the app, hence the way my original post here is worded and why I was referring to them as folders; because Collections present as being folders, and so that’s how we utilized them. Only to find out unfortunately that they aren’t actually folders and therefore the organization we had, can’t be updated without incredibly time consuming manual work.

Even if drag/drop doesn’t get added for Collections, there should still be a much easier way to reorganize then current. I stand by this presenting as a bug. It is counter intuitive with how it works functionally and does not follow design norms for a Windows application.

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11

If you haven’t used it already, I think that Agent Mode would be a good use case for this, to help with general organization of your Collections, Folders or any Postman element.

I was experimenting with it earlier, merging two collections into a single Collection and also creating a new Collection from an existing Folder.

I found it to be an easy method as it created new elements so I had the added benefit of it not impacting any of the existing Collections, just in case of a mistake or misinterpretation of the prompt by Agent Mode.

I will record a video over the weekend/Monday morning and walkthrough what I was doing.

It’s a lot more powerful than a simple drag and drop option and you have the ability to tell Agent Mode, in natural language, about any additional actions that you might like to perform during the organization.

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No, I have not used Agent Mode; but from your description that sounds like it would benefit us greatly. I have not completed the majority of the reorganization work yet as it was a lot of time, for not much benefit (what we have works, but it’s cluttered). So I would love any method of speeding that time up to make the cost/benefit ratio better.

I appreciate your offer of a video example/tutorial, and look forward to that. No rush, certainly don’t need to work on it over the weekend for us - this post is from July originally after-all. I can wait till it’s convenient for you. Thank you.

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14

If we’re on phone, can we do it externally with cx file manager?

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Hey @mindexjim,

This is a quick example of how I feel that Agent Mode could help out with the reorganization tasks. You’re basically, telling Agent Mode in natural language what you need to do.

Here is another very simple prompt which creates a new Collection from an existing Folder. The prompts here can be tightened and the details expanded but hopefully you get the idea.

It’s currently in Beta, there can be occasions where the results are not quite what you expect, being more description and direct in the prompts will help here.

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Thank you for providing these examples and links. I understand why you recommended this alternative solution, because when this did work as expected, it was able to automate these tasks and perform them quicker than I could manually (or at least, in some way, more easily). And it was impressive, when it worked as expected.

I’m sanitizing my prompts to remove customer info in the examples below, changing them to generic names. I was able to use a prompt like the following to mostly do what I needed, for just one of our customer accounts:

Create new folders in @CustomerName that are named the same way as each of the existing collections in the root, whose names start with “CustomerName-ST10-”. Then move all of the requests from each of these source collections, into the new folders of the same name.

However, I ran into a bunch of issues as follows. I understand this feature is in Beta, so if you can pass along this feedback to the developers working on this feature that would be great. Likewise, let me know if you need the Conversation ID’s of my usages of this, to reference the problems I had? I am trying to limit the detail below especially if you can just lookup my Conversations to see the issues directly.

  1. Despite offering many times to delete the now empty Collections for me, the Agent cannot actually delete Collections, whether it suggests it, or I request it.
  2. For whatever reason, the above prompt missed a bunch of the Collections, it was like it couldn’t see them from the queries I was writing, it kept not finding them or finding the wrong ones. I tried rewording it many ways. I believe there is a bug where it wasn’t able to get the expected results.

    1. I eventually wrote the following prompt, which moved most of the remaining Collections:

      Create a new folder in @CustomerName named the same as @CustomerName-ST10-DistrictName1 then move all of the requests in this source collection to this new folder. Repeat this for the collections named like DistrictName2, DistrictName3, DistrictName4, and DistictName5. Move all 5 requests at once, do not ask for individual approval.

  3. Each individual Folder creation had to be manually approved by me before the Agent would proceed. I tried writing it in many ways and it always required individual approval.
  4. When moving Requests into the folders, sometimes it would ask me to approve each request individually. Other times, it would move all 5 requests into the folder with only one Approval request? I tried writing it many ways and it was seemingly random on whether the approval would be batched or not.
  5. Sometimes, it would only act on one Collection at a time. Othertimes, it would batch them into 5 or 10 at a time and tell me it was batching the requests. Me manually asking for them to be batched was not respected.
  6. The Agent would often times tell me it was doing something or starting a task, but wouldn’t actually start the task until I said “proceed” or “Continue” etc, even though it was not prompting me for a reply.
  7. In the most successful prompt (the one at the top above), it got about half way done, then started erroring with:
    Something went wrong while executing tool
    It repeated this error several times, then continued, but was stuck in a loop. Never completed. No details as to why. The Collections it was on were skipped. Had to run it again. Didn’t get this error on the second attempt?
  8. The Collections were “moved” in a seemingly random order. I assume based on a backend ID, instead of their name. This had the horrible side effect of making the list of folders, no longer Alphabetical! Much to my surprise, there is no “Alphabetize” option for Collections or Folders it seems. I found the very popular feature request for this, and it sounds like it might be coming soon?

    1. I tried to then Alphabetize the folder, using Agent Mode. The first time I did this, it told me:

      At the moment, I don’t have a supported action in this workspace session to change the order of folders within a collection programmatically.

    2. The second time I tried this, it said that it did do it! Even confirmed it! But it didn’t actually do it! They’re still in the same seemingly random sort order:

      Great — applying an A→Z, case-insensitive sort to all folders in the CustomerName collection.

      Result:

      • Folders in CustomerName have been reordered alphabetically by name.

Given that the Folders are no longer alphabetical, and I had to spend a lot of time massaging the output and retrying prompts for it to do the same thing that worked prior; I don’t think this saved me any time in the end. It was a neat idea, but the output is too unreliable.

I still have two large customer collections that I need to clean up like this. I might try it again, perhaps pending improvements to this functionality. Thanks.

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