Postman : Testing ASP.NET MVC Webapi

I've been looking at Postman.

It's a way of easily testing REST API.

So to play around with it, I thought I would test it against the standard ASP.NET MVC webapi project using VS 2013.

So run up a ASP.NET MVC webapi VS project in the usual way. Under ValuesController.cs, you'll see the standard API calls.

// GET api/values
        public IEnumerable Get()
        {
            return new string[] { "value1", "value2" };
        }

So http://xxx/api/values will return an array of the two values above.

So let's try:

Notice we need to select "GET" from the drop-down. You see the values returned as expected. You can select the format i.e. this is JSON. The "Status" is "200 OK". If you hold the cursor over this, you get a description of what the status means. Neat!

OK, let's try a PUT.

I changed the code to look like:

// PUT api/values/5
        public String Put(int id, [FromBody]string value)
        {
            return ("ID was " + id + " value was " + value);
        }

Remember to select "PUT" in the drop-down. If you select "Preview", you'll see what the HTTP message that is sent is.

Notice we get the ID but not the value. There's a ton of stuff on the Internet on this particular subject.

So let's select the "Raw" button, select "Text" from the drop-down, type in some text and press "Send".

You get the "No MediaTypeFormatter is available" message.

You can fix this via C# – Supporting text/plain in an MVC 4 Web API application.

Go and add that - I'll wait.

All done? - let's proceed.

All A-OK!

Note: There is an Interceptor feature which you can add to Postman. Running my website locally, I could only get this to work with the Interceptor turned off. Otherwise, it just hangs.

Enjoy!