What's your most used feature in Postman aside from a bare API call

🗣 General Discussion
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Hey folks,
I’m new to this forum and have only used Postman for very basic tasks. Or, really, only one task: making an API call (GET or POST) for testing purposes. I’d love to learn a bit about what’s the most useful features of Postman aside from this basic usage where you paste the URL and hit send.

If your scenario has already been listed as an answer, feel free to just :+1: to that.

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Hey @jansche!

I LOVE this question and am excited to see what folks say!

I actually wrote a blog post talking about some of the cool Postman features people may not know about!

If you want to get your hands dirty and check out the features in a workspace, you can fork the collection and play around with them yourself.

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That’s a very useful article, @sean.keegan. Thank you for the pointer. I wonder if you will need to edit it once we see some replies here. :grin:

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Glad you liked it! And now I’m really hoping this thread leads me to write a “10 Postman Features Everyone Should Know Part 2: Community Edition!”

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I love it for :slight_smile:

  1. Play around with API call
  2. Test Automation
  3. TDD using Mock and API feature
  4. Monitor availability of service using Monitor feature
  5. API Documentation
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@jansche Welcome to the Community :partying_face:

Yes, this is a great question :innocent:

I frequently use,

  1. Adding Test scripts to the collection/folder level (some common assertions)
  2. As I always say, Dynamic variables are my all time fav
  3. Monitoring the collection :computer:
  4. If I see any interesting API documentation, I blindly start a collection in Postman and would love to see the responses. Of course, I am not a developer but I love to build :building_construction: the requests using the API documentation in Postman in my free-time. Recently I came across an application what3words. I felt this is interesting, so I started building my Postman collection. So if you give your latitude and longitude this will give you random three letter word for your address, for eg: ///activism.shuffle.snore

You can see this collection in my public workspace here.

  1. Specially Lodash libraries :raised_hands:

I hope you find this interesting too :blush:

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Thanks, @bpricilla and @praveendvd. This already gives me some good pointers what to learn next. :pray:

Friends, are there more favorite scenarios / use cases? I’d love to hear them.

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I would look into websockets , haven’t played around much with it

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ooh, so many…

Like @bpricilla, I’m also a huge fan of the Dynamic Variables - Super useful. :heart_eyes:

Also, adding elements (Auth, Scripts, Tests) to the Collection and Folder levels help with duplication of code at the request level. :heart:

All the different ways to use the methods from the pm.* API are also super cool - The common ones being getting and setting variables but actions like setting request headers or changing the request body in the pre-requests can be very helpful too :trophy:

I could go on and on and on about the features I love but looking forward to hearing more from other people… :pray:

This is also a great post by Tristan Denyer, an engineering manager at Postman, about some personal favourites:

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Another shoutout for Dynamic Variables!

@jansche oh, nice - never knew about the workflow controls - that will start getting used heavily from now on!

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I love the collection runner, I use this a lot mainly for bulk updating and creation of resources in the backend.

This is really cool feature to test automation capabilities with minimal coding using just JSON or even CSV file as input :stuck_out_tongue:

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