About Postman

Postman is an API testing platform that developers use to design, build and test APIs from a cross-platform desktop client or on the web.

See the Postman website for more information, or to subscribe and/or download the Postman client.

Audience

The primary audience for the Hornbill Platform Postman Collection is developers with an interest in building integrations from external sources into the Hornbill Platform.

It can be considered an aid to learning, and an extension to the Platform API documentation found elsewhere in this book, to help developers understand and visualize what is required when making API calls into the Hornbill Platform.

Example

In the image below we have used the admin:userCreate API example from the Hornbill Platform Postman Collection to create a new user on a Hornbill instance:

Download

The required files are contained in a ZIP archive, which can be downloaded here.

Once downloaded, extract the archive, which contains two files:

• hornbill-postman-environment.json - This is a Postman environment file, which contains the necessary environment variables
• hornbill-platform-postman-collection.json - This is a Postman collection file, which contains the example API definitions

Installation

• In Postman, click on the Environments tab in the left-hand menu
• Click the Import button, find the hornbill-postman-environment.json file that you extracted from the ZIP archive, and import
• Click on the Collections tab in the left-hand menu
• Click the Import button, find the hornbill-platform-postman-collection.json file that you extracted from the ZIP archive, and import

Configuration

To authenticate your API calls using an API Key generated against a Hornbill user:

• Open the imported Environment in Postman, and update the current values for the APIKEY and ENDPOINT variables within the imported environment:
  • The APIKEY variable should be populated with a time-limited API Key, generated against an account in your Hornbill instance. For further information, please see our API Key documentation
  • The ENDPOINT variable should be populated with the API endpoint for your Hornbill instance. To locate and copy this:
    • Log in to your Hornbill instance
    • Click on the configuration cog
    • In the configuration search, type in usage, and select the Subscription / Usage result in the Platform section
    • Click the Support tab, and copy the Endpoint value from the resulting page
• Set the Environment as Active

Once the above steps have been completed, you will then be able to make API calls into Hornbill from the imported collection.