Is Postman not able to convert data between request formats?

I’ve been using the excellent open-source RESTer browser extension to test my APIs for years, but I finally felt like giving Postman a try.

I discovered that Postman lacks a feature of RESTer, which is to automatically “convert” request data between formats.

For example, say you’re sending a POST request with a bunch of ampersand-delimited POST data. Your raw request might look like this:

When you want to edit or add to that data, it might be easier to edit the data in a form-like view (especially if the raw data is long or complex).

In RESTer, you can simply switch the request type to “Form” and it’ll automatically parse the raw data into a form UI:

My question is: can Postman do the same thing?

It’s become a fairly critical part of my workflow to quickly edit and debug requests. Despite its trivial nature, the lack of such a feature is a dealbreaker for me.

Hey @pm769 :wave:

Welcome to the Postman Community! :postman:

Looks like a nice feature, you can raise it as a new feature request here, for the team to take a look.

Personally, I don’t recall anyone ever mention having that as a feature within Postman but I’m learning about new things all the time.

What made you give Postman a try, was it a lack of features within the other tool? Something else?

Could you walk through your typical workflow so we can understand why not having that would be a deal breaker?

It’s difficult to understand from the images, as you’re showing a GET request with what looks like a set of query params but you have entered them as a plain text request body but at the same time talking about a POST request. :thinking:

It is not an available feature, as @danny-dainton mentioned you can put in a feature request and should be a quick win for Postman.

There is some precedence for this quality of life request as when you put query parameters into the request URL it automatically fills out the “Params” section so it is not a stretch that they could parse the text from a RAW input and if it matches the form input then it could be parsed as individual fields under the Body tab.

There is a feature (not exact to what you want) that enable “Bulk Edit” of the body by using a <key>:<value> format and using \n (newlines) to add multiple parameters at once.

Outside of this feature, I hope you are finding more value in Postman that this frustration doesn’t turn you away. There is an immense amount of value that Postman can offer in your entire API workflow for an individual to an enterprise.

I know some of the other tools has similar offerings but I feel there is a large enough adoption within the industry that you can find examples on how to do some very interesting things with the Collection runner and its pre/post scripting among other benefits of the Postman platform.

Thanks for replying. Sorry for the confusion re: GET vs POST; I’ve updated my screenshots.

Basically my workflow involves making lots of small edits to each request when manually testing various API endpoints. It’s a very manual, tedious process (and could no doubt be improved with automation) but having a form UI helps speed up the process of editing the request data simply because I don’t have to manually edit a long request string.

It’s a small quality of life change but it does help.

Thanks, I’ve raised a feature request on GitHub.

I did see the bulk edit and it’s definitely a nice feature in the same vein as my request, but wasn’t quite the same.

When I’m using RESTer I can copy and paste raw strings of request data straight from my application, quickly edit them in a form UI, and then see them converted back to a raw string. It’s pretty handy.

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