Exploratory Testing of an HTTP REST API with Postman and Fiddler proxy

workaround for postman proxy issue shown in this video- start proxy first, check browser sends traffic through proxy, then start postman pointing at proxy. I'm not sure if electron didn't shut down properly, or what. But when I reboot, and started in that order, Postman worked through proxy fine.
A short exploratory testing session on a REST API running locally using Postman and Fiddler.

This session was a simple exploratory testing session based around the documentation supplied by the REST API application.

- Postman v 5 failed to respond to the `--proxy-server=localhost:8888` command line option - later investigation revealed that Postman still supports --proxy-server so I don't know what caused that issue in this video
- Postman v 5 can use proxies that act as default system proxy e.g. Fiddler or Charles
- Using `Accept` header to change the content format of the response payload
- Content Type validation of payloads in Postman
- using different HTTP Verbs from Postman
- Save requests in Postman to build up a 'collection' of requests
- using Basic Auth in Postman requests
- Pretty print payloads in JSON and XML in Postman
- Using examples in documentation as test data
- Why we should create custom data that makes testing self-documenting
- 405 is returned with a Method is not valid
- 201 returned on POST messages which create entities

*************

*************

►► Contact Details:

Read my writing and blogs at:

Follow me on social media:

*************

►► Read my books

★ "Dear Evil Tester" - explore the tester's mind
★ "Java For Testers" - learn to code in Java
★ "Automating and Testing a REST API - a case study"

*************

►►Learn skills from my online training courses

★ Selenium WebDriver With Java
★ Technical Web Testing 101
★ Evil Tester Talks Technical Testing
★ Case Study: Java Desktop Application Technical Training

*************

[letsreadtogether]

Thanks for the video.
I just wanted to share that if we open console window in postman, we will see all the attributes sent in request which means that there will be no requirement to set up a proxy.

[amitwertheimer]

Hi,
I have a couple of questions:
1. I could see you doing a lot of things, sending some data to the application. was there a reason for sending the particular input you did?

2. I can see why send traffic through ZAP, as it would point to a lot of stuff (for instance, it would flag revealing "jetty" as your server in the returning headers, which in some contexts is an issue), but apart from painting errors in red, was setting up fiddler actually worth it?

Also, I've heard that there's fiddler for mac now, not sure if it is the default proxy or not.