Skip or ignore request using Newman

Ask the Experts and Postman Tips
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1

I have reviewed different posts several times with problems similar to the one I have but the result I have found has not been as expected. Basically I want that once a variable X is set to true certain requests are ignored. I already saw that once the request is being processed there is no way to prevent the request from being made to the URL, that the option is to use postman.setNextRequest() so that in a sequence of requests A->B->C in A is told to skip to request C to ignore request B, but what happens when you have 100 endpoints and need to skip 20? You have to enqueue in 80 requests who is the next request to execute? The requests to ignore are scattered in all the folders that include my collection because under certain circumstances they are not tested but tomorrow maybe they will. Is there an easy way where you can go to the requests that shouldn’t be executed and put something in there to prevent them from being processed?
Would it be wise to open an issue on GitHub related to the ability to get to a request and say no, I don’t want you to run, without chaining as much using postman.setNextRequest()?

2

Hi @macg9106 !

As of now, the main way to conditionally control the flow of requests in a Postman collection is the postman.setNextRequest() function. This can become a bit difficult with larger collections.

For more dynamic control, you can use the Postman CLI or Newman, in combination with something like Node.

With this approach, you can programmatically modify your collection’s execution flow before passing it to Newman.

3

Hi,
Sorry, but that is kind of difficult to fathom.
First of all:
This exists: pm.test.skip();
Why does it not actually skip the request?? Not even in the pre-request script.
As you yourself already mentioned, postman.setNextRequest() is basically a very bad approach for big collections. I would be ok with it if postman.setNextRequest(null) would skip the next request and continue on, but it actually stops the whole execution altogether.

Thirdly, why is skipping a test so difficult in postman/newman? It should be as easy as:

...
"event": [
                    {
                      "listen": "test",
                      "skip": true,
....

Skipping a test is basic to any testing tool. It cannot be so difficult.