REST API Document Generation with SoapUI

[Musaffir]

Hello,

This may sound like a weird question , but I wanted to give it a try

I started using soapUI some time back and already made a relatively bigger project with various REST API resource end points,and generated Test suites etc.

And now I am thinking to have an option to make a interactive decent documentation for all those REST API endpoints , so any testers or business people can simply go through it and under stand a bit better on what are the API resources available and what does they do et cetera..

Do we have any workaround or logic available to achieve this relatively easily with the existing soapUI project that I have ?

I have heard we have {{Swagger}} from Smartbear which is extensively for all the API documentation purpose , but do we have option to mix up the Swagger and existing soapUI project to achieve documentation relatively a little easier .

Any idea in general on API documentation , or in the above direction would help me 

Thanks in Advance !

Regards

Musaffir

[HKosova · Accepted solution]

SoapUI 5.2+ includes the Swagger plugin that lets you export your project to a Swagger spec in the JSON or YAML format. You can then use Swagger UI to render the Swagger spec as interactive API docs - check out the demo at petstore.swagger.io.

If you are interested in using Swagger for API documentation and/or API developent, also check out SwaggerHub - it's our cloud hosting for API specs, combined with collaboration features, versioning, privacy control, mock server, client/server generators, and integrations. A free plan is available.

[Musaffir]

Thank you Helen for the reply.

As I am on the open source version of SoapUI , I downloaded the swagger plugin and made it available to SoapUI explicitly.

I could see the 'Export swagger' option from the context of project in soapUI and I am able to export to json format as well.

But it seems not giving a nice out put as i expected when I parsed it with the Swagger UI.

My project has all a single rest api service having different resources end points.

And in the same project I have generated Test suites as well, so the project xml file it self is a huge one, will this cause a problem like what I am experiencing now ?

I was expecting I can simply export the spec file from my soapui project and pass it to swagger UI to get the documentation , instead of writing all the spec by hand 🙂

Warm Regards

Musaffir

[HKosova]

Hi Musaffir,

Could you please elaborate what you mean by "it seems not giving a nice out put"? Can you post a screenshot?

Also, where did you download the plugin from? If you use SoapUI 5.2+, this plugin is included so there's no need to download anything. Just in case, the current version of the plugin is 2.2, if you downloaded an earlier version try this one instead:
https://github.com/SmartBear/soapui/blob/next/soapui-installer/src/BundlePlugins/soapui-swagger-plug...

[Musaffir]

Hi Helena,

Thank you so much for the reply.

I was using 5.2.1 version and for some reason I didn't see the swagger option there .

Now I updated my soapUI to 5.3.0 and I see the option by default and I could export the swagger specification file , and was able to parse it to browsable documentation .

Now am looking forward to make it a good api documentation

Thanks again for the support , i will get back to you if i have any question in future 🙂

Warm Regards

Musaffir