Creating Customized RingCentral Postman collection

1. Creating Customized RingCentral Postman collection Anirban Sen Chowdhary

2. RingCentral, which provides different communication features such as call, messages, fax, meeting etc and exposes different APIs for each of them for full scale communication testing and application development by RingCentral developers. RingCentral APIs was actually designed to enable businesses of all sizes to take their communications to the cloud, decreasing costs and increasing productivity and business benefits.  Several custom application can be build on the top of these APIs by the developers as per their need such as web applications, standalone, cloud based etc which use these APIs and customize the need.

3. Testing tools for APIs

4. There are several testing tools available in the market for testing the APIs. The most commonly used by the developers and tester is Postman. Postman client is the most popular testing tools for APIs as well as RingCentral APIs over the years. Though RingCentral has it's own platform for API testing in API reference page available here which helps to interact with the API in real time, but still Postman client is popular flexible tool available.

5. Since there are huge numbers of different RingCentral APIs available for different functionality, there is also a huge demand for Postman collections within the community for all these updated RingCentral APIs that can be directly import to Postman for testing. Although there are some Postman collections available here, but not sure if those are updated with times.

6. The best way to get a full fledged Postman collections is to create our own "Customized" Postman collections. This will not only help us to keep our Postman collections updated with all API changes, but also help us to add selected APIs in our customized collection as per our need ignoring the ones which we actually don't required.

7. Here is a simple steps to create our own "Customized" Postman collections and import APIs to our Postman client: We first need to go to the RingCentral API reference page available here. Let's select the API we need to add in our "Customized" Postman collections. for example "Send SMS" API we select to add it in our collection:

8. Let's fill out the API information like phoneNumberTo and From, text to send etc. Click “Try It” and follow the instructions. There will be cURL command on the right will automatically update with your auth information:

9. As we can see the cURL command is automatically created which means the API is ready for testing. (I have blurred some information for security reasons). Now, let's open Postman and Click the “Import” button, located on top left corner:

10. We can now click the “Raw” Text tab and paste the generated cURL command in the text field and click “Import” button

11. Postman now will automatically import and generate the authorization headers and body. We can now use it as a template for all other API's using Postman. We can now the imported API template in our Postman and test it:

12. We will able to send a new SMS to our destination. For testing purpose I have send the SMS to my ow number which I have received:

13. That's it! We can now add all the APIs we want into our Postman and create our own API collection for testing our application. This is a very easy and flexible way to get and add APIs into our collection. We can add one after another in the collection in our Postman and keep on testing our application.

14. Thank You