User Feedback - Postman Flows

Hey everyone!

Weā€™ve released support for Postman Flows (beta), if you havenā€™t tried it yet give it a go!

Weā€™ll be using this thread to centralize any feedback you may have on the feature. This will help us ensure that weā€™re heading the right way as we move towards the next steps in improving Flows.

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Awesome! Congratulations!

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It is awesome, cannot I export them?

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Thanks!
You canā€™t export them just yet.
I am curious to understand your use-case though? What do you plan to use the flow for after exporting it?

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Thanks for taking the flow for a spin!

TL;DR - Youā€™ll need to use multiple validate block right now.

All blocks can have N<>N relations theoretically. But in your example it would become difficult to predict what the validate block outputs from its ports.

I am supposing this is what your flow would look like?

Here itā€™s difficult to predict which response will get fed to the terminal first, from ā€œRequest 1ā€ or ā€œRequest 2ā€.

Also, If you plan to do something different with the data from either of the request, that would not be possible either.

I just want to share it with my colleague I created a routine helpful at work.

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Will Flows be able to be run from Monitors in the future?

I would love to test it, but canā€™t figure out how to get the option to appear in my sidebar menu. Do I need to have a paid license?

Got it!
Weā€™re working on making it possible to collaborate and also share your flows with others

Weā€™re looking into multiple ways you can trigger a flow programatically. And yes, monitors is a strong candidate!

  • Being able to select and move more than one block at once would be helpful.

  • Related to the above, using left mouse button to select single/mass select and middle mouse button or right mouse button to drag around the flow would be great - because I think thatā€™s the standard/default expectation for mouse controls.

  • Being able to copy/paste blocks (or groups of blocks) would be helpful.

  • Right now, it looks like you can do N ā†’ N only if you add a ā€˜Combineā€™ block in the middle so, N ā†’ Combine(s) ā†’ N. It would be really neat if you didnā€™t have to have the ā€˜Combineā€™ blocks, and could just have the N ā†’ N. The way I think of it is essentially turning each block into a promise, and only moving to the next step if all the blocks have completed.

  • It would be great if you could select an existing collection and import it into a flow. This would make it so you could skip a lot of busy work of individually creating blocks if you already have a collection setup, or you just captured a workflow using the postman interceptor into a collection.

  • Adding on to the above, if you could add a collection or another flow as a block in a flow - that could save a lot of time, and would allow you to turn potentially large and complicated processes into clean and easy to understand flows.

Nope! You can use Flows as a free member as well!

Make sure youā€™re using the latest version of the app, or try using Postman on the web.

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Not the original poster, but exporting flows for saving into source control would be nice. Or, if eventually flows functionality increases and you can run a flow from newman - then being able to run a flow in a CI/CD process.

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You can use SHIFT+ mouse drag to select multiple blocks :+1:

There is an option to duplicate a single block right now, multiple blocks are not supported yet.

Makes sense, are you also expecting to convert any logic in your scripts onto the flow canvas?

Let me get back to you for this one :eyes:

You can use SHIFT+ mouse drag to select multiple blocks

AWESOME! I missed that!

Makes sense, are you also expecting to convert any logic in your scripts onto the flow canvas?

That would be cool, but I thought it could get super complicated. I understand that flow was built with a non-programmer in mind, but I already have a lot of collections with custom scripts, and I donā€™t need to convert that code into the canvas format. All Iā€™d really care about though is having all the pm.tests come back as good for the collection/flow as a block (which would then show the green checkmark).

My proposed use case would be to build more complicated flows, and use other flows/collections as a ā€˜stepā€™ or ā€˜set of stepsā€™ for end-to-end integration testing. I could then show my testing steps/flow and results to my project managers/compliance folks.

Let me get back to you for this one :eyes:

I can show you that it works - but hereā€™s a screenshot of what Iā€™ve done. It works in that my first two requests need to complete before any of the third step requests happen. I donā€™t need to actually do anything with the combine using the canvas, because my requests already have Test Scripts written to get/handle the data I need, and then all of my third step requests can now happen asynchronously and in parallel.

Do we provide API to trigger flows? This is so helpful if we can apply e2e testing. CI/CD pipeline will trigger flows to check API status.

Its awesome Postman! Thanks for enabling this.
I have one quick question - Is there a way to see request object in SendRequest steps? I see failures in response and wanted to see what the request contained.

Also, I know its a weird ask but seems a helpful one for my case -
Can we set a Collection level variable via the ā€œCreate Variableā€ Step?
(Actually there are few SendRequest that come next in the flow that want to use the variable value in their Header)
Thanks in advance

Thanks for that example, I understand your usecase now. And thereā€™s a very handy feature for just that usecase. Theyā€™re called ā€œSignal switchesā€ and are located at the bottom of each block.

If you connect the output switch of Block 1 to the input switch of block 2, Block 2 will only fire after the block 1 has finished execution.
This will basically act like a promise and can be used for synchronisation.

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You can take help of the Postman console thatā€™s present in the bottom to view the request youā€™ve sent. Just like youā€™d do with the request builder.

You can not set Collection, environment or global variables in flows. The ā€œCreate variableā€ block is used to define only ā€œData variablesā€. Learn more about different scopes here

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