How useful are flows when it comes to validate data?

[william-ashoti]

Hi there,
At this moment Iam discovering Postman Flows. It’s really useful when it comes to people who are less technical. Visualize the process to them step by step is very helpful.

But as a tester I want to use the flows in postman a step further. For example I want to validate the outcome of response and when the outcome (actual value) differ from the expected result I want the flow to fail. But this one is still hard to do it (for me then) because when I use the Evaluate block the Result will be true or false. But still the flow succeed.

So my question is, is it possible to make a flow when the expected value differ from the actual value the flow will fail? Or how can I make it fail?

Other question is, is it possible to use csv file in flows. I have read in the topics that it is possible but not clear how to do it. Maybe a link to a tutorial should be fine.

Kind regards,
William Ashoti

[flows-daniel (Daniel Kimmelmann)]

Hi @william-ashoti

Welcome to the forums!

In terms of failing a flow, it depends on if you’re running locally vs in the cloud. If you’re using Actions in the cloud, you can use the response block to return a 4xx or 5xx code and then whenever you call the Action it will response with a failing status code. For a local run, you can have a display block that all your failures are connected to that tells you if the flow failed at any point.

Flows can’t work with your local filesystem but if your CSV is a Google sheet or similar that can be accessed via an API then you can use it.