1 00:00:00,750 --> 00:00:02,760 - [Instructor] Hi and welcome back. 2 00:00:02,760 --> 00:00:05,408 In this video we're going to be getting a professional tool 3 00:00:05,408 --> 00:00:08,930 for API testing that's really awesome. 4 00:00:08,930 --> 00:00:11,752 It's called Postman and you can 5 00:00:11,752 --> 00:00:15,951 get it the getpostman.com/apps. 6 00:00:15,951 --> 00:00:18,403 When you get to the website, you will see 7 00:00:18,403 --> 00:00:20,439 something more or less like this. 8 00:00:20,439 --> 00:00:23,653 I see a Main button here which is download Postman for Mac, 9 00:00:23,653 --> 00:00:25,284 but I'm assuming that if you're on Windows 10 00:00:25,284 --> 00:00:27,919 you'll see download Postman for Windows. 11 00:00:27,919 --> 00:00:30,244 So just download Postman for your appropriate platform 12 00:00:30,244 --> 00:00:34,056 such as Windows, Linux or Mac and instal it 13 00:00:34,056 --> 00:00:38,497 like any other normal application and then we can run it. 14 00:00:38,497 --> 00:00:42,497 If you prefer, you can run Postman from within Chrome 15 00:00:42,497 --> 00:00:44,970 as an add-on, you can do that as well 16 00:00:44,970 --> 00:00:47,993 if that's what you like doing instead. 17 00:00:47,993 --> 00:00:51,785 Once you've downloaded it and run it 18 00:00:51,785 --> 00:00:55,452 you will see something that looks like this. 19 00:00:59,753 --> 00:01:01,455 It'll be slightly different because I've already 20 00:01:01,455 --> 00:01:04,213 got some stuff here, but what you'll see 21 00:01:04,213 --> 00:01:07,358 is a window that looks more or less like this. 22 00:01:07,358 --> 00:01:09,324 So you'll have your runner, import 23 00:01:09,324 --> 00:01:10,283 and a few buttons up here. 24 00:01:10,283 --> 00:01:12,840 You'll have a team library which will not be accessible, 25 00:01:12,840 --> 00:01:16,514 and also you'll have your stuff up here. 26 00:01:16,514 --> 00:01:18,911 You'll have to sign up to get here first, 27 00:01:18,911 --> 00:01:23,541 but that's sort of a given with any application these days. 28 00:01:23,541 --> 00:01:25,664 Then what I want you to do is create 29 00:01:25,664 --> 00:01:30,365 a new folder here, and I've called it REST API course, 30 00:01:30,365 --> 00:01:32,053 but you can call it whatever you want. 31 00:01:32,053 --> 00:01:36,220 Your collection, give it a nice name, it's usually better. 32 00:01:38,509 --> 00:01:43,103 Okay, and then in here, you can create folders 33 00:01:43,103 --> 00:01:45,415 I created a folder called section three 34 00:01:45,415 --> 00:01:47,066 because this is the section we're in. 35 00:01:47,066 --> 00:01:48,814 I would recommend you do that as well. 36 00:01:48,814 --> 00:01:50,244 It'll be very useful later on for you 37 00:01:50,244 --> 00:01:53,975 to have these collections to bring your memory back 38 00:01:53,975 --> 00:01:55,725 if you forget things. 39 00:01:56,732 --> 00:02:01,417 Then we're going to go over to the main sort of content. 40 00:02:01,417 --> 00:02:05,841 This API testing tool let's us make requests 41 00:02:05,841 --> 00:02:09,628 and as you can see the first button here is get. 42 00:02:09,628 --> 00:02:11,816 We can change that and we can use any 43 00:02:11,816 --> 00:02:15,566 of the other available HTTP verbs, GET, POST, 44 00:02:16,470 --> 00:02:20,097 but also, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, COPY, HEAD, OPTIONS, 45 00:02:20,097 --> 00:02:21,264 and many more. 46 00:02:23,318 --> 00:02:26,049 In this API we've only used GET and POST, 47 00:02:26,049 --> 00:02:29,322 we will use others as the course progresses. 48 00:02:29,322 --> 00:02:31,454 Then we have to enter the request URL, 49 00:02:31,454 --> 00:02:35,621 so that's gonna be HTTP://107.0.0.1:5000/store. 50 00:02:42,226 --> 00:02:44,614 Once again, this is your local computer 51 00:02:44,614 --> 00:02:46,299 this is the port that you're running on 52 00:02:46,299 --> 00:02:49,970 and this is the endpoint we're accessing. 53 00:02:49,970 --> 00:02:52,416 Then you've got a blue button called Send. 54 00:02:52,416 --> 00:02:54,135 Don't know why I said green there. 55 00:02:54,135 --> 00:02:56,683 A blue button called Send and when you press that 56 00:02:56,683 --> 00:02:59,665 that will execute the request, do make sure, however, 57 00:02:59,665 --> 00:03:02,924 to have your server running, so I'm gonna make sure 58 00:03:02,924 --> 00:03:06,603 that it is running, that's the latest version 59 00:03:06,603 --> 00:03:09,054 and then you can press Send. 60 00:03:09,054 --> 00:03:13,371 And what you get back is your API content. 61 00:03:13,371 --> 00:03:16,341 So exactly as we would expect. 62 00:03:16,341 --> 00:03:18,832 Once that's done you can also press Save 63 00:03:18,832 --> 00:03:21,853 to remember this request, normally I save my requests 64 00:03:21,853 --> 00:03:25,078 just as the endpoint name, and save it 65 00:03:25,078 --> 00:03:28,587 to the appropriate collection and press save. 66 00:03:28,587 --> 00:03:31,060 Now you've got it here, and you can easily 67 00:03:31,060 --> 00:03:33,470 go back to it at any point. 68 00:03:33,470 --> 00:03:35,734 Now what I would recommend you do now 69 00:03:35,734 --> 00:03:39,534 is to press the three buttons here, the three dots, 70 00:03:39,534 --> 00:03:42,277 and press Duplicate, then make sure 71 00:03:42,277 --> 00:03:45,044 to go into that endpoint. 72 00:03:45,044 --> 00:03:47,533 If you then go and change this one and then you press save, 73 00:03:47,533 --> 00:03:49,098 it will be over written and you will lose 74 00:03:49,098 --> 00:03:50,909 the other endpoint, so just make sure 75 00:03:50,909 --> 00:03:55,421 to keep duplicating these endpoints as you go along. 76 00:03:55,421 --> 00:03:59,588 This endpoint we're going to call /store/My Wonderful Store. 77 00:04:01,145 --> 00:04:04,403 Which, as you remember, is what we've got 78 00:04:04,403 --> 00:04:07,570 in our stores list as our first store. 79 00:04:09,318 --> 00:04:10,985 So let's press Send. 80 00:04:12,153 --> 00:04:14,266 And as you can see we get back the data 81 00:04:14,266 --> 00:04:17,146 that we would expect from this store. 82 00:04:17,146 --> 00:04:20,463 So that's really great, we can see that it is working. 83 00:04:20,463 --> 00:04:22,788 Once again, press Save to make sure 84 00:04:22,788 --> 00:04:26,488 that this endpoint is saved and then you can, 85 00:04:26,488 --> 00:04:28,348 once again. press the three buttons, 86 00:04:28,348 --> 00:04:30,398 the three dots, and press Edit 87 00:04:30,398 --> 00:04:34,565 and give this a nicer name, such as /store/name. 88 00:04:35,442 --> 00:04:37,925 Then go ahead and duplicate that. 89 00:04:37,925 --> 00:04:40,583 Go over to the new store and for example, 90 00:04:40,583 --> 00:04:43,083 we can access item, we can see 91 00:04:44,230 --> 00:04:47,730 that we get the items for this store back. 92 00:04:48,812 --> 00:04:51,886 Once again press Save, edit this one, 93 00:04:51,886 --> 00:04:55,227 give it an appropriate name and that's that. 94 00:04:55,227 --> 00:04:58,727 Now we have created our three GET requests 95 00:04:59,636 --> 00:05:02,052 and these are not really the problem. 96 00:05:02,052 --> 00:05:04,324 These are just really accessing a URL 97 00:05:04,324 --> 00:05:05,956 and then we get some data back. 98 00:05:05,956 --> 00:05:10,077 Now, the more interesting bit is when it comes to creating. 99 00:05:10,077 --> 00:05:14,244 So let's duplicate the GET store, go over to that endpoint 100 00:05:16,275 --> 00:05:18,525 and change the GET to POST. 101 00:05:20,815 --> 00:05:25,063 Now when we run this, we will get an error. 102 00:05:25,063 --> 00:05:28,986 As you can see this is an internal server error 103 00:05:28,986 --> 00:05:33,208 because we have not sent it the data that it expects. 104 00:05:33,208 --> 00:05:36,988 We have to send it some JSON data, and using JavaScript 105 00:05:36,988 --> 00:05:39,117 that's slightly more complicated and out of 106 00:05:39,117 --> 00:05:43,224 the scope of this course but using Postman it's really easy. 107 00:05:43,224 --> 00:05:46,016 Remember to save your endpoint first. 108 00:05:46,016 --> 00:05:49,551 Change the name to it's more reasonable. 109 00:05:49,551 --> 00:05:54,435 Let's go over to the headers and a header of a request 110 00:05:54,435 --> 00:05:58,720 is the first thing that gets analysed by the server. 111 00:05:58,720 --> 00:06:00,791 So the first thing that flask is going to do 112 00:06:00,791 --> 00:06:02,531 when it receives a request, it is gonna look 113 00:06:02,531 --> 00:06:04,381 at the headers to try and understand 114 00:06:04,381 --> 00:06:07,249 sort of what this request is. 115 00:06:07,249 --> 00:06:08,717 In the headers we can say things like 116 00:06:08,717 --> 00:06:12,564 what sort of data, what type of data we're sending. 117 00:06:12,564 --> 00:06:17,385 So this is a set of key value pairs and the first header 118 00:06:17,385 --> 00:06:21,454 is going to be Content-Type and the value 119 00:06:21,454 --> 00:06:25,037 is going to be application/json. 120 00:06:26,525 --> 00:06:29,846 Now, when we send a request with this header 121 00:06:29,846 --> 00:06:33,053 the server is going to be expecting JSON code 122 00:06:33,053 --> 00:06:34,553 to be in the body. 123 00:06:35,692 --> 00:06:37,541 So we're going to go to the body 124 00:06:37,541 --> 00:06:40,864 and we're going to select raw. 125 00:06:40,864 --> 00:06:43,651 Notice how because we've got a header, Postman automatically 126 00:06:43,651 --> 00:06:46,818 selects JSON from this drop-down list. 127 00:06:48,065 --> 00:06:52,029 But there are many other types of data we can send. 128 00:06:52,029 --> 00:06:53,713 We're also going to look in the future 129 00:06:53,713 --> 00:06:57,880 at what form data and what x-www-form-urlencoded are. 130 00:06:59,433 --> 00:07:02,964 But, don't worry about those for now. 131 00:07:02,964 --> 00:07:05,872 In the body, because we're creating a store 132 00:07:05,872 --> 00:07:08,084 the only thing we need is the store name. 133 00:07:08,084 --> 00:07:12,790 So remember, JSON always uses double quotation marks, 134 00:07:12,790 --> 00:07:15,540 so that's "name": "Another store" 135 00:07:16,561 --> 00:07:19,314 and this is all the data we need in our body. 136 00:07:19,314 --> 00:07:22,314 So let's see of this and press Send. 137 00:07:24,269 --> 00:07:25,701 And there you can see we get the 138 00:07:25,701 --> 00:07:28,664 new store returned as you would expect. 139 00:07:28,664 --> 00:07:31,148 Let's go and look at our code. 140 00:07:31,148 --> 00:07:33,659 And the new store dictionary returns 141 00:07:33,659 --> 00:07:37,826 a new store with a new name and an empty items list. 142 00:07:39,679 --> 00:07:42,430 We append that to the stores and then 143 00:07:42,430 --> 00:07:44,590 we return the new store. 144 00:07:44,590 --> 00:07:46,870 And that's indeed what we've got here. 145 00:07:46,870 --> 00:07:50,164 Remember to save the request then go to your GET store 146 00:07:50,164 --> 00:07:53,289 and when you press Send should we be expecting 147 00:07:53,289 --> 00:07:55,456 the new store to come out? 148 00:07:58,047 --> 00:08:01,703 Yes we should, and indeed we have here our stores list 149 00:08:01,703 --> 00:08:05,870 and there have the first store and the second store. 150 00:08:07,021 --> 00:08:09,993 Now let's go over to our last endpoint. 151 00:08:09,993 --> 00:08:12,743 Duplicate the GET store name item 152 00:08:14,457 --> 00:08:17,428 and I'm going to change it to a post 153 00:08:17,428 --> 00:08:20,178 I'm gonna save it, edit the name, 154 00:08:22,551 --> 00:08:24,243 and then we are once again 155 00:08:24,243 --> 00:08:25,172 gonna do the same thing. 156 00:08:25,172 --> 00:08:28,831 So what's the first thing we have to do? 157 00:08:28,831 --> 00:08:30,546 That's right, set the header 158 00:08:30,546 --> 00:08:34,379 to be content-type application/json 159 00:08:38,239 --> 00:08:40,853 and then the body to be raw. 160 00:08:40,853 --> 00:08:43,585 And here we're going to set the name of the item 161 00:08:43,585 --> 00:08:46,502 to be another item, price, and this 162 00:08:48,508 --> 00:08:51,758 is going to be a decimal so just 10.99. 163 00:08:52,692 --> 00:08:57,401 Save and Send, and we get an internal server error 164 00:08:57,401 --> 00:09:00,734 so we've evidently done something wrong. 165 00:09:01,935 --> 00:09:05,834 So what to do now is go over to the terminal, 166 00:09:05,834 --> 00:09:09,751 look at the errors and we've made a small error 167 00:09:10,719 --> 00:09:13,461 somewhere in the pass so this is the trace back, 168 00:09:13,461 --> 00:09:16,347 it's a lot longer than it used to be. 169 00:09:16,347 --> 00:09:19,026 At the very bottom, we see the error name. 170 00:09:19,026 --> 00:09:23,489 NameError: is the name, 'request data' is not defined. 171 00:09:23,489 --> 00:09:25,283 Directly above the error, we see 172 00:09:25,283 --> 00:09:28,310 the line of our code that went wrong. 173 00:09:28,310 --> 00:09:31,623 This is the file app.py line 51 174 00:09:31,623 --> 00:09:35,790 and we see request_data equal equal request.get_json. 175 00:09:38,279 --> 00:09:40,612 Do you spot the error there? 176 00:09:44,603 --> 00:09:47,538 It's easy to make small typos while recording 177 00:09:47,538 --> 00:09:49,203 but nevertheless is gonna be very useful 178 00:09:49,203 --> 00:09:53,707 the problem is that equal equal is used for comparison 179 00:09:53,707 --> 00:09:57,874 such as here, whereas a single equal is used for assignment. 180 00:09:59,982 --> 00:10:01,741 So that was the small error there, 181 00:10:01,741 --> 00:10:04,537 make sure to restart your server, 182 00:10:04,537 --> 00:10:06,787 and then run Postman again. 183 00:10:08,916 --> 00:10:12,327 And there we get our other item. 184 00:10:12,327 --> 00:10:15,564 Something to remember though, we've restarted the server 185 00:10:15,564 --> 00:10:18,264 so when we get our list of stores, 186 00:10:18,264 --> 00:10:20,710 what do you think is gonna come out? 187 00:10:20,710 --> 00:10:23,043 Our two stores or one store? 188 00:10:27,589 --> 00:10:30,072 And this is the problem, we're only gonna get 189 00:10:30,072 --> 00:10:33,880 one store back because whenever we restart the server 190 00:10:33,880 --> 00:10:36,536 we lose the applications memory, 191 00:10:36,536 --> 00:10:39,829 and therefore the stores variable gets deleted. 192 00:10:39,829 --> 00:10:42,291 When we start the server again, 193 00:10:42,291 --> 00:10:45,643 the stores variable gets set to this list again, 194 00:10:45,643 --> 00:10:48,271 which only has one store. 195 00:10:48,271 --> 00:10:50,057 Obviously the solution to that is 196 00:10:50,057 --> 00:10:54,261 to store things permanently in a database or in a file. 197 00:10:54,261 --> 00:10:56,650 Over the next few sections, we are going to look 198 00:10:56,650 --> 00:10:59,176 into how to store things into a database. 199 00:10:59,176 --> 00:11:02,890 That seems fairly useful for a REST API 200 00:11:02,890 --> 00:11:05,150 to be able to do, so we're going to look 201 00:11:05,150 --> 00:11:08,434 into SQLAlchemy to easily and efficiently store 202 00:11:08,434 --> 00:11:10,864 our resources such as our stores 203 00:11:10,864 --> 00:11:13,197 and our items to a database. 204 00:11:14,091 --> 00:11:15,282 So this is Postman. 205 00:11:15,282 --> 00:11:19,848 Postman is extremely useful for testing API's 206 00:11:19,848 --> 00:11:23,738 I cannot stress that enough, I use this thing everyday 207 00:11:23,738 --> 00:11:27,238 at work and I know most people do as well. 208 00:11:28,323 --> 00:11:30,096 It's because it just let's you have 209 00:11:30,096 --> 00:11:32,557 all your API endpoint's here and whenever you 210 00:11:32,557 --> 00:11:34,733 make a change to one of them, or whenever you want 211 00:11:34,733 --> 00:11:37,836 to verify that something works the way you expect, 212 00:11:37,836 --> 00:11:41,376 you just go in here and run the endpoint. 213 00:11:41,376 --> 00:11:43,777 Then you can check that the data returned is correct, 214 00:11:43,777 --> 00:11:47,580 the thing is coming back as opposed to giving you an error 215 00:11:47,580 --> 00:11:50,572 and things like that, so it's really essential 216 00:11:50,572 --> 00:11:52,676 that whenever you're creating REST API's 217 00:11:52,676 --> 00:11:56,083 you keep all your endpoints here so you 218 00:11:56,083 --> 00:11:58,926 can test them as you go along. 219 00:11:58,926 --> 00:12:01,147 That's everything for this video. 220 00:12:01,147 --> 00:12:02,631 Hopefully you learned something about 221 00:12:02,631 --> 00:12:04,982 how software developers work professionally 222 00:12:04,982 --> 00:12:08,338 with REST API's and I'll see you in the very next one.