Partial interoperability with postman

[CaptainQuirk]

Hi there,

Would it be possible to work on the following things to get a minimal interoperability with postman :

• json export to the postman (or any other format that has wide adoption) collection format, with optional automatic export on buffer save.
• external variable support in an environment file.

Thanks !

[diepm]

I've heard of postman but not really used it. Could you elaborate your ideas a bit more (use cases, workflow...)? I can try with postman and see if it's feasible to implement. Thanks!

[CaptainQuirk]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay in my response !

To elaborate a bit, postman is a GUI app that features REST route collections, exportable to a single json file. The postman collection format is supported by other REST client.

The GUI is a classical one.

• On the left, a sidebar with collections (projects) containing folders (resources) containing individual routes
• On the right, the main panel with the route method, path, headers, body

There's a concept of environment. The GUI exposes a view where you can create variables that can be used as tokens in various other places :

• Define a variable resourceId and use it in a route `http://localhost:80/resources/{{resourceId}}
• Define a variable title and use it in the body of a POST request :

{
    "title": "{{title}}",
}

An environment can also be exported to a json file

There are of course numerous other features.

With that summary in mind, I would really much like to be able to :

• Set a specific directory in a project as a REST collections repository
• Create a hierarchy of subfolders corresponding to the one described above
• Have a plugin function available to export this folder hierarchy to a postman collection file, with a setting allowing it to be done automatically when saving a file in this folder
• Have a plugin function available to import a postman collection into the existing folder hierarchy
• Have a way to create environment variables through a json file and have them replaced in routes, body, headers etc

I'm would be glad to work on this but I've written at most 2 functions in VimL in my whole life, so I would need some guidance !

Thanks in advance !