/postman-iterate-data-collections

A "how to" guide for setting up Postman Collection Runner w/ variables

Using Postman's Collection Runner:

Iterating through collections using CSV data, using dynamic variables

Use Case

Documentaion and "how-to" use Postman to loop over a collection of API calls. Postman's own resources on the topic are found here Postman Scripts Brancing & Loopin. Postman also provides an excellent Discourse forum for the Postman community of users; I found this resource to be extremely helpful while learning how to use these features.

This guide will show you how to set up the collection runner in Postman with two use cases:

  • 🅰️ Setup and run a collection with a single request and a single URL variable
  • 🅱️ Setup and run a collection with two requests and use data from the first request in the request body of the second

Problem

1) Working on a project using the fleet management product: Fleetio - I needed to remove a very large (nearly 70,000) data set representing innaccurate service data, and ultimately replace it with new data.

NOTE: Fleetio does not support a bulk .csv import to "update" or PATCH these service entries - therefore I needed to remove all of the bad data using their API, before being able to re-write the new (correct) data later on.

2) Using the software UI - it would take forever to delete these entries, even with account owner permissions. The maximum bulk delete a user can perform w/in the UI is 200 entries at one time... so using the API is the clear choice here.

NOTE: Fleetio settings <> in order to perform a delete action - the user's API token must also have permissions to delete the corresponding data.

3) I turned to Postman's collection looping feature as a solution to this problem that needed to be solved on a tight timeline.

Resources

NOTE: For this project I did not care about keeping particular service tasks w/in a service entry - we are going to remove and re-write the entire service w/ a new format.