The option to “Share” a Collection or Environment Definition used to be present so that the object could be accessed from different collections. (I Noticed this change in version 9.1.1)
With the latest version of Postman All I see when I Select the “Share” option is “Share link to the collection/environment” or “Move collection/environment”
What is a person supposed to do with the “URL” to an collection/environment, when what I want is to access an environment definition in another workspace.
I don’t want to MOVE the Environment Definition!!!
I need the “environment definition” in question to be accessible in multiple workspaces without having to have and maintain multiple copies of the same object. for the last 4 years we have built our entire Postman Usage Model around this.
We have more than 30 Collections spread across multiple workspaces that use common environment definitions which can be Edited in any of the respective workspaces and the changes are reflected for all workspaces.
This latest change is NOT an enhancement, it is in fact a detriment!!!
The feature has indeed been removed, as of the current version (I’m using 9.5), on the web and in the application.
Instead, you are supposed to either have your team all use the same Workspace, or “fork” the Collection or Environment to their personal Workspaces. There will soon be a way to do a Pull Request and have team members push their changes back to the original. But I don’t know how all the other team members would then pull the pushed changes back into their personal Workspaces, without forking again! There must be some new workflow they are cooking up that hasn’t been released yet. Until then, we are stuck with the partially-implemented and more complex fork functionality!!
I’ve contacted support and registered my frustration with the removal of a simple “share” function. they are reporting it to their product team. I included a link to this discussion.
We have ~7000 requests across 33 collections that depend on a single environment definition
We have the collections spread across 3 workspaces for ease of manageability.
We are now having to manually update the Environment Definitions in all 3 workspaces because they are no longer “sync’d”.
Previously a change made in one workspace Environment Definition was instantly propagated to the other workspaces.
Creating “forks” doesn’t replace that functionality… someone still has to do “Pulls/Pushes/Merges”…
POSTMAN: This is a Significant Reduction in the usability and Desirability of this product!!!
I agree with all the previous comments. This is definitely a loss of functionality from our perspective.
One interesting observation is that if a collection was previously shared with multiple workspaces you can still add new requests, and folders, and they will be synced. The core functionality is still present in the current version.
If some new sharing model is being developed, please roll it out soon. We were just about start a large team initiative to add many API tests. This loss of functionality is a significant impact for us.
I am the Product Manager for Postman Workspaces and wanted to address the feedback here. We removed the ability to share collections/environments between Workspaces. This was done as a result of feedback from customers, who had difficulty in managing their collections and maintaining a single source of truth. For example, since a collection could exist in multiple workspaces and can be edited instantly, customers found it hard to maintain tighter controls and ensure that a single edit doesn’t break their entire workflow.
As an alternative, you can fork an environment or collection to a different Workspace and also create a Pull Request to contribute changes back to the “Master” collection. We see this model as being a trade-off between enabling teams to have tighter controls on their Collections/Environments while also being able to collaborate.
However it is clear that there are things we can do to improve the experience further. We are planning for this and would like to get early feedback from folks on this thread.
Many times environments are common across collections/workspaces. Managing it in each workspace would be difficult. Don’t you think making a particular change in an environmental variable in all workspaces is a nightmare?
Consider bringing back this one-click feature. The fork feature is a bit complicated and not implemented completely.
By taking away the feature and workflow that our team has used for years, you have greatly diminished the value of Postman in our enterprise. We are looking to migrate away from our subscription to your software package, because this change has invalidated all of the training and established procedures we have invested in your product.
One problem with the continued “Mantra” from Postman about “you can use forking/merging/Pull requests etc.” is that these are NOT mature features, They are NOT intuitive and they are NOT easily used, nor is there effective documentation on using them.
When we started using Postman it was a “Test Tool” and we developed our entire model of using it around that. It is used in our implementation primarily by “Test Engineers” not developers. There is a very wide difference in skill sets between the two disciplines.
It seems that you are trying to make Postman a “One Stop Shop API IDE”. To me and the folks I work with this is not the best way to go.
The overall appeal of Postman, as a valuable “Testing Tool” has been GREATLY Diminished.
PLEASE Bring Back the ability to “Share” Collections and Environment Definitions across Workspaces…
We found a simple solution to these feature changes that will suit our existing team workflow.
Instead of sharing an API Collection from our company workspace into “My Workspace” we are simply going to make all of our changes directly in the company workspace.
We will essentially eliminate the use of “My Workspace” entirely, which allows us to collaborate in the manner we are used to.
The only change our developers have to make is a 1 time transfer of Environment settings from “My Workspace” into our shared company workspace, specifically entering their secrets under “Current Value,” which does not get saved or shared back to the workspace.
No, we do not currently use the fork collection functionality and we are unfamiliar with how PRs work in Postman.
My manager is interested in using forks for his own testing purposes, but he does not intend to publish any of his changes back to the company’s shared collection.
We may experiment with the fork + PR model, but for now we are happy to continue operating under the classic paradigm that our whole team has been trained on.
You made this change without even announcing it in release notes. This kind of massive change takes care & communication and as far as I can tell there was zero. Took me a long time to even find this thread to figure out what is going on. Like bkirsch, this has completely broken the cross-team workflow we had established (which was hard enough to get everyone on board with in the first place).
In addition, you removed the “Remove From Workspace” option in the collection context menu. I have many collections shared into my personal & team workspaces and I can’t figure out how to remove them at all without deleting the entire collection from all workspaces.
