User experience with postman variables

Hello all,

We are using variables in our postman collections and I noticed a few things that make their usage quite difficult:

  • When sending requests individualy, it is difficult difficult to see the actual request and headers sent, you can only see them by overring over with the mouse, and it is not possible to see the actual request body that will be sent or that has been sent. I end up using the collection runner to send individual requests.

  • The example feature is quite interesting, but here again, when using variables, the variables are not substituted in the example, which make the functionality almost useless. When saving examples for documentation purpose, the actual values that were used matter more than the variables.

Best Regards.

For what it’s worth, you can look at the console to see what was sent in the request.

And for examples, you don’t have to leave those as dynamic variables. They are examples, used for documentation and mock servers, it might be better to have them static.

Thanks allen, I didn’t notice yet that it’s available in the console.

For the examples, unless there is an option in postman to do the conversion automatically, this is not very convenient. For example, we have dynamic variables that use the current date to compute ages, so that the request always works, but when saved as an examples, it would make more sense to see the actual dates sent in the request to compare them with what was returned in the response.

What are you using these examples for?

Sounds like an interesting use case.

We wanted to use the examples for documentation, and it’s better to have the response with the matching request for that.
But examples have a bit gotcha: they are kept when duplicating request, obviously, and if we forget to delete or update them, we end up with very big collections full of forgotten examples which do not match anymore, and it is really annoying to go through all the requests to delete them one by one.
We use newman instead, it can generate HTML report with everything in it and that’s better than examples for what we want.