Added postman tutorial #35
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abhutta0
requested review from
mwand,
JoyMitra,
anurag-arasan and
VatsalMehta27
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Pretty good start! I've left comments in the sections where I feel we could refine the tutorial, based on what I've observed and shared in my office hours with students. Overall, I think some additional clarity on an API request and its components would be important to really understanding what the buttons in Postman mean. I've also added links to some Postman documentation that we could include to guide the student for further exploration.
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| # Tutorial: How to Install and Use Postman | |||
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We might be able to broaden this to Understanding API Requests & Using Postman, considering that there's no existing tutorial on API requests, and no prerequisite undergrad course really talks about this.
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| ## Introduction to Postman | ||
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| Postman is a popular API testing tool that allows developers to build, test, and modify APIs quickly and easily. It provides a interface to interact with APIs and simplifies API development. Postman supports making requests like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and more. |
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In reference to the first comment, it would be useful to briefly outline what each of these request types mean. Also, maybe suggest 1-2 real examples for why you might define an endpoint as a specific type. (e.g. GET for accessing videos related to the one you're currently watching, POST to save a new uploaded video...)
| Postman is a popular API testing tool that allows developers to build, test, and modify APIs quickly and easily. It provides a interface to interact with APIs and simplifies API development. Postman supports making requests like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and more. | ||
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| With Postman, you can: | ||
| - **Send requests to APIs** to retrieve or submit data. |
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A breakdown of the parts of any request would help students create their own later on. For example, when I was talking to a student, I needed to describe that GET typically uses params to send arguments, but for POST you use body. Request header description would be another example.
A quick reference to the URL representation may also help here.
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| With Postman, you can: | ||
| - **Send requests to APIs** to retrieve or submit data. | ||
| - **Test API responses** to ensure that they return the expected results. |
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Add overview of the main status codes (like 200, 400, 404, 500) and their meaning?
Mozilla documentation for reference: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status
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| 2. In the request window, choose the type of request method (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) from the dropdown menu (default is GET). | ||
| 3. Enter the URL of the API you want to test in the input field (e.g., `https://localhost:8000/api/users`). |
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Maybe add a clarification that the endpoint of interest should be part of the URL?
Also, the Postman "Getting Started" guide uses this url: postman-echo.com/get. That'll be more responsive for students doing this tutorial in isolation compared to using a localhost example.
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Same comment as previous image.
| 2. Double-click the file to start the installation. | ||
| 3. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation. Postman will install automatically and open once the process is finished. | ||
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| #### For macOS: |
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For Mac, it's important to know what chip you have, could use a quick mention:
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| # Tutorial: How to Install and Use Postman | |||
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Should add a Contents section with hyperlinks to headings, like the other tutorials we have
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| 5. Click the **Send** button (make sure your backend is running). |
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We should move the "(make sure your backend is running)" to the start of the section. Maybe a Step 0? Or at least at the beginning of Step 2.
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| ## Introduction to Postman | ||
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| Postman is a popular API testing tool that allows developers to build, test, and modify APIs quickly and easily. It provides a interface to interact with APIs and simplifies API development. Postman supports making requests like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and more. |
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After this paragraph, do we want to add that you can make these API requests using programming language like Python (requests library) or Node (axios)? IP1 includes the following:
You can send requests to the server using a tool like Postman, or by writing scripts that use axios to send requests to localhost:8000, as you did in the Async activity.
I suggest this for 2 reasons:
- If this is a broader guide about API requests + Postman, more experienced students can review the API requests topics and then switch to the language of their choice.
- It emphasizes the user-convenience that Postman provides.
More of a nit-picky suggestion, but something to consider
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