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InfoQ Homepage News Low-Code API Builder Postman Flows Moves into General Availability

Low-Code API Builder Postman Flows Moves into General Availability

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Postman moved Postman Flows, their low-code API building tool, into general availability. Postman Flows provides a collaborative, graphical interface for building API-driven applications and workflows. It integrates with the Postman API Network to access publicly available APIs.

Postman Flows presents three main programming blocks: actions, information, and logic. Action blocks perform a specific task, for example, the Send Request block performs an HTTP request. It presents a number of options, such as Send which provides the input connector to this block. It can be set to auto-detect the returned data's schema (JSON or XML). It also presents outbound connectors for success and failure responses.

Postman Flow interface

Postman Flow interface (credit: Postman)

 

Information blocks allow for storing and passing of data as variables. There are a number of supported variable types including strings, Booleans, numbers, dates, or formatted data (such as JSON). They can be used to inject data into a task block.

Logic blocks cover flow control such as looping or conditionals. This includes the Evaluate block that uses the Flows Query Language (FQL) to query the inputted structured data. It provides a freeform text box for inputting the query and will return the results of that query to the next block in the workflow.

FQL is used to parse and transform JSON data to extract the data needed for the workflow. Given the following JSON block:

{
    "name": "John Smith",
    "address": {
        "city": "Atlanta",
        "state": "GA"
    },
    "phones": [
        {
            "type": "Home",
            "number": "123-456-7890"
        },
        {
            "type": "Cell",
            "number": "098-765-4321"
        }
    ],
    "display name": "myuser123"
}

Accessing top-level fields with FQL is done by entering the field's name. For example, name will return "John Smith". This can be used to return the value of fields or objects. Accessing a nested field is done via dot notation: address.city. To access individual items within an array, square bracket notation is used: phones[0].number. FQL also supports some basic operations such as $count to return the number of elements in a list: $count(phones).

The Output block can be used to present data visually using charts and graphs. This includes presenting data in bar charts, line charts, gauges, and tables. The Output block can also be used to show data as text or present images and videos.

Flows provide a remote execution URL that can be integrated into other applications as a webhook endpoint. Webhooks can be tested locally before deploying into the cloud. Note that each time the flow is released, a snapshot of the collections and environment are saved with it. If changes are made within those areas, the flow will need to be re-released.

Recent improvements to Postman Flows include improved autocomplete functionality within the Evaluate and If blocks. A new AI-assisted query creator was also added. This feature accepts a simple text sentence as input and will output a suggested FQL query.

Postman Flows is now available for general use. It is free to use for up to three users within the Postman Free plan.

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