Forum Discussion

AndyHughes's avatar
AndyHughes
Regular Contributor
7 years ago
Solved

How do I extract the new resource created via a REST POST for use in a subsequent request?

The API I'm testing is RESTful so I can create a resource such as an account number by sending a POST to AndysAPI/newaccount

The code there generates an account number for me based on the details I've provided, but being RESTful does nothing but send back a success message in the raw response and the newly created URI ie AndysAPI/newaccount/1234.

That great but there's no message body. Therefore I can't update this resource by referencing it in a subsequent test using a GET DATA.

Any ideas how to get round this? I want to be able to extract 1234 from the raw response and use it in a subsequent request to update the account. At the moment I can only put the entire raw response in the next request because I can't specify the part I want.

  • groovyguy's avatar
    groovyguy
    7 years ago

    I have a few snippets that you might be able to use for parsing out the data you want.  I'm going to have to fudge some of it since I do not know what your raw request looks like.

     

    testStep = context.testCase.testSteps["Test Step Name"];

String request = new String(testStep.testRequest.response.rawResponseData);

    // Set up a split-by-newline array for parsing line by line
    String [] splitData = request.split("\n");

    for (String eachSplit : splitData)
    {
          if (eachSplit.contains("AndysAPI/newaccount")
          {
               // Building this off of the example "AndysAPI/newaccount/1234"
               // This creates an array with from the string, using "/" as the delimiter
               def accountNumber = eachSplit.tokenize("/")[2];
               log.info(accountNumber);
          }
    }

     

    That should be enough to get you started.

11 Replies

Sort By
  • groovyguy's avatar
    groovyguy
    Champion Level 1
    7 years ago

    You can try to write a groovy script to parse the raw response to get the data required. That might work if it's not showing up in the non-raw response. 

    • AndyHughes's avatar
      AndyHughes
      Regular Contributor
      7 years ago

      Im not that good with groovy but I could work out how to do it. But actually I think that what you're describing is already possible using 'Get Data' within the software. ie I can already grab the whole raw response. The problem is that I want a specific part of the raw response. Eg. currently Im getting:

      HTTP/1.1 201 Created
      Cache-Control: no-cache
      Pragma: no-cache
      Content-Length: 0
      Expires: -1 

      HERE IS THE URI...at the end of which is the new resource I want to grab. 1234.

       

      I just want to put 1234 into a parameter.

       

       

       

      • groovyguy's avatar
        groovyguy
        Champion Level 1
        7 years ago

        Since there's no data in the response and you have to go to the Raw response, Get Data may not be able to handle that accurately. Typically GetData, if you want to narrow down to one piece of information, needs to have a body to the response.

        You could try using a Property Transfer step and see if that works. I ran through something similar where I had to parse a UUID out of my response headers, and groovy script ended up being the best way for me since I needed to store the UUID and use it more than once.