Evaluate Embedded Variables "All the Way Down"

[Dave_Westerman]

We make heavy use of environment variables in Postman. But I’ve run into two roadblocks:

1. pm.environment.get() (and its equivalents) do not evaluate embedded variables. So if I get a variable that has another variable in it, {{var1}} is not replaced by val1.

I got around this problem by writing a common function that I call in all my tests instead of pm.environment.get(). The function is called recursively until all the variables aree evaluated:

var funcGetAndEvalEnvVar = (varName) => {
  const EMBEDDED_VAR_REGEX = new RegExp(`{{\\w+}}`, 'g');
  var varValue = environment[varName];
  var evalVarValue = varValue;
  var reMatch;
  while (reMatch = EMBEDDED_VAR_REGEX.exec(varValue)) {
    var embeddedVar = reMatch[0];
    var embeddedVarName = embeddedVar.slice(2, -2);
    if (environment.hasOwnProperty(embeddedVarName)) {
      var embeddedVarValue = funcGetAndEvalEnvVar(embeddedVarName);
      evalVarValue = evalVarValue.replace(new RegExp(embeddedVar, 'g'), embeddedVarValue);
    }
  }
  return evalVarValue;
};

2. After resolving the issues with #1 above, I thought I was in good shape. However, I also use variables in the request bodies, that contain embedded variables at multiple levels. The variables seem to only be evaluated at a limited number of levels. So I’m still having the same problems.

I tried to write the following pre-request script, but of course, according to the doc, the request object is read-only (I created this script just in case it might be wrong!):

var REQUEST_DATA_VAR = 'requestData';
pm.environment.set(REQUEST_DATA_VAR, request.data);
request.data = funcGetAndEvalEnvVar(REQUEST_DATA_VAR);

My feature request is that it would be very helpful if all environment variables at all levels would be evaluated by Postman.

If this is not possible / feasible, then my alternate feature request would be to give the pre-request script a way to update the data in the request, instead of it being read-only.