Postman

As of July 2024, there have been changes in the use of the environments. Please import the environments as specified in this documentation AND the updated fulfillmenttools API collection.

During the development of fulfillmenttools as an API-first product, the design, documentation, and testing of the APIs are taking a high priority. Therefore, a wholesome Postman collection is in use and frequently updated with new requests as they appear in the API.

This page shares this resource with developers or other technical personnel to ease access to the fulfillmenttools RESTful API and share concrete examples.

Available resources

Postman divides its functionality into several categories such as collections, environments, mock servers, etc... For documentation purpose fulfillmenttools provides a template environment and the collection of calls towards fulfillmenttools RESTful API. In order to work with the collection you need to import the environment into Postman and fill in the data as described below.

Step 1: Import or create fulfillmenttools environments in Postman

The environments contain variables that tell Postman where to address specific calls and which data should be used. If you want to try out an existing fulfillmenttools system using our Postman collection, importing and setting up environments is recommended.

If you just want to glimpse at the calls, you don't need to set up an environment.

Two environments are necessary to work with Postman, one global and one tenant-specific. To create the global one, download our Globals environment template and import it into Postman. See Postman documentation on how to import an environment into Postman.

The same step must be done with the tenant-specific environment. An example file is available for download (don't forget to replace the ocff-example-prd with the correct projectId).

Theoretically projectId and host can be added to one environment. However, if additional tenant environments are added, the split can help.

The tenant-specific environment has to contain the projectId:

Variable	Description	Example Value
projectId	The id of the used project.	ocff-example-prd

The global environment must contain the host value:

Variable	Description	Example Value
host	The Host of your fulfillmenttools platform environment	https://{{projectId}}.api.fulfillmenttools.com/ ------ {{projectId}} is right here, leave it like it is.

When using Postman, more variables will occur in the environment. Be advised that especially authTokens & refreshTokens will be stored in the environment of the Postman Instance you are using.

Step 2: Import fulfillmenttools API collection into Postman

Similar to setting up an environment, you can import the collection of Requests into Postman. Please download the needed file and import it into Postman as described here.

fulfillmenttools API, and thus, the collection of calls is constantly growing. Therefore, regularly updating your collection of calls is a good idea to stay updated with the latest changes.

Once you successfully imported the collection, you are presented with a view similar to this:

List of fulfillmenttools products and their respective REST calls

Step 3: Define authentication Postman Vault values

To prevent the sync of sensitive data into the Postman Cloud, we use the Postman Vault. This is a local encrypted storage that is not synced to Postman. Accessible is Postman Vault in the Postman IDE in the bottom right corner with the Vault-Button.

Now, the following variables have to be set. Replace {projectId} with the actual project id in the shape of ocff-example-prd, so that the variables look like, e.g. ocff-example-prd-user.

Variable	Description	Example Value
{projectId}-user	The user that exists in the system, usually in the form of an email. Please include the host part of the login.	[e-mail]
{projectId}-password	The password of the user.
{projectId}-api-key	The api key to our IdentityProvider to generate a AuthToken	AIZaSyCvIDK187vJWfl5EICJ_g_bNyvdARhdeXw

Sometimes, Postman gets in trouble if the password contains quotation marks or a backslash. In this case, add a backslash to escape the character.

Example: My"Nice\Password -> My\"Nice\\Password

Step 4: Make your first API Call using Postman

The documentation on how to Make your first API Call says we need to issue at least two calls to communicate with the API: First, we need to get an Auth Token and then use this Auth Token in our call towards the fulfillmenttools API. Let's do exactly this using Postman:

Request to get a fresh authToken by using the environment variables apiKey, login and password.

After the call has successfully been executed, the response is received from the IdentityProvider containing (among other data) the actual authToken and a refreshToken, which are used for calls against the fulfillmenttools API.

Both values are stored as environment variables - you do not need to copy those!

Now we can run every call in the collection - in this example, we will request the list of facilities:

The result of the request to get all facilities

Have fun!

Now, you are ready to go and adapt and execute the other calls or create new requests.