Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Graph, 28 Jun 2022

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From YouTube: Taking advantage of the Microsoft Graph Postman collections

Description

In this 16-minute developer focused demo – in this 2nd installment in the Microsoft Graph Postman series, Rabeb Othmani steps through 3 features demonstrating the integration between Postman and Graph Explorer. 1) Adding a request to a collection after getting request syntax from changelog or Graph Explorer, 2) using the collection runner to run a sequence of requests within a collection, and 3) using Resources Explorer in Graph Explorer to find/export selected resources and then import them to a Postman collection. This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on June 28, 2022.

Demo Presenter
• Rabeb Othmani (Microsoft) | @Rabeb_Othmani

Supporting materials
• Documentation - Use Postman with the Microsoft Graph API | aka.ms/graph/postman
• Demo - Introduction to Microsoft Graph Postman collection - Sébastien Levert (Microsoft) | @sebastienlevert
• Changelog - Microsoft Graph Changelog (Preview) | aka.ms/graph/changelog
• Tool - Graph Explorer | https://developer.microsoft.com/graph/graph-explorer
• Documentation - Using the Collection Runner | https://learning.postman.com/docs/running-collections/intro-to-collection-runs/
• Documentation - Running collections on the command line with Newman | https://learning.postman.com/docs/running-collections/using-newman-cli/command-line-integration-with-newman/

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/m365/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/m365/community

A

Hello, everyone, my name is rabeb and I am a product manager with the microsoft graph team. This is the second session of this series. We are doing around postman and the microsoft graph collection. I do apologize. I couldn't make it last week, but the week before my colleague, sebastian leves, he did the intro session and he went through some of the basics around postman.

A

How to use the echo collection with postman just so you can get used to postman in case you're not, and then he went through the collection, the microsoft graph collection, the I think, the seven or eight steps that you need to set up everything you need and be up and running. I highly recommend this session again, if you're not familiar with postman or if you've never used our microsoft graph collection. This is really useful session I'll.

A

I have it on my browser, so I'll make sure, after my presentation, I'll make sure to leave all the links that you need on the chat and what I'm planning to do today is just continue from that and we're gonna look at some of the useful features within postman and how you can take advantage of them, while you're using the microsoft graph collection and testing the different apis running that so, uh first, just a quick uh reminder, and for everyone on the call who are not familiar with postman postman is a developer too.

A

It is an api platform where you can build apis test with the apis. It's really rich on features and it allows for very advanced scenarios, collaborations, etc. It's it's a really great place to start, if you're like working with apis and one of the amazing features on postman is collections which is basically a collection is a set of requests together, they are collected into uh nice folders and uh you can do different things with them.

A

The good news is, we do have a collection for microsoft graph, so the collection- you know it comes in with predefined endpoints, some variables that you can use to run the request, etc.

A

Again, aka dot, ms slash graph, slash, post name, that's where you can find all the details on how you can fork the collection set up everything you need get an application on the azure active directory, so you have the right permissions, etc. I will make sure I have all the links for you, and that is all the uh powerpoint we will need for today.

A

So now, if I do share my browser, so we can take a look at the actual platform, which is a postman.

A

Is this the one I need? I think so um so uh here I am, I am on postman. This is my own workspace. I already did for the microsoft graph collection and, as you can see it's here, it's nicely organized in delegated and application two folders, depending on the type of permission you need and then the different things that you can do again. As I mentioned, I'm gonna look at some features with postman, but I think they are really useful and then I'm gonna look at something else as well with graphics, plural.

A

Now. The first thing I want to highlight here we keep adding new resources and new endpoints to microsoft, graph, all the time.

A

So maybe you know there is a new api added that you want to test, but it's not on the microsoft graph collection yet or it could be that it's something that used to be in beta and then it's in v1 and we didn't update the collection yet- and I think this is a good time for me to make a public promise that we will do a better job at making sure the microsoft graph collection on postman gets updated regularly.

A

I promise it's recorded, so so that's that's definitely gonna happen, but in case, for whatever reason you might need to add another request to what's already available on the collection that is actually possible. So if we go here on these three dots, I guess it's known as the kebab menu you can see among some of the things you can do with the collection is, you can add a request now? My collection is nicely organized into folders and I don't want just to drop a request anywhere. Luckily, you can do the same thing with any subfolder.

A

So if I go to any of these subfolders, I can see that I want to add a request now for the sake of this demo, I'm like okay, I want to make sure I'm adding the new request, but it's not already available on the collection. So what I want is I went to aka dot, ms slash graph, slash change log, because we do have this in case you don't know about it.

A

We always use this course to remind you of all the tools and cool features that we have and that you can use, and I was just checking what did we add very recently that is not available on the collection and that I can use for my demo and turns out there is this checklist item resource that is recently added to the to-do tasks api.

A

So if I click on this item, I know I can go to the documentation and I can see everything related to it and I can get the request that I want to add to the collection, but I am slightly lazy.

A

I also happen to be the pm for graphic explorer, so any excuse to use graph explorer and to show you how cool it is, and I know for a fact that I can find that request on graph explorer now, if you've never seen this resources stop before and if you have no idea what that is just wait. A second we're gonna come back to this in details in a few minutes, but here is my request, because I have it over there and I'm gonna take it.

A

I'm gonna lazily copy that and I'm gonna go to this folder called tasks, and I'm gonna say I want to add a request here. I'm gonna copy this first, these are my params, so I'm gonna make sure they are highlighted. As such, the one.

A

And I might want to call this something nicer, which is get.

A

To ask: was it the uh checklist items something like that now, because these are pronouns? It says here that it's unresolved variable, so there is no value for the co for postman to run. The request with you can add these. You can add a new variable if it's not pre-defined with the collection, I'm not going to do this at the moment. This is just to show you how you can add a new request if I um click save.

A

I can check here that this item is added and, as you can see, you need to define the right variables and the more I think about it. Probably it's better. It's a better idea if we just keep the original collection up to date, but just in case in the extreme cases, you do need to to add one of your own requests to the collection.

A

Now you know that this option is available for you now. The second thing I want to show with collections is the collection runner.

A

Basically, the collection, runner is a nice feature that allows you to run the requests within the collection in a sequence. So there is a specific order on how to run the request. This is really great. If you want to test your collection and even uh like run, the collection do some testing. You can even connect that to your cicd pipeline using newman, which I just learned, it's a command line tool from postman to run collections.

A

So if I come here, I can see round collection and in here, because I select a drum collection on the main microsoft graph collection. Every single request available on the collection will show on here and it's selected.

A

There are a few settings that you can set on the runner, for example, iterations, which is how many times do you want to run this collection automatically? You can set it to one you can set it to more than once. The delay is. Do you want the requests to run immediately, one after the other, or is there a specific delay between every two requests?

A

You might even select a json or a csv file. If you need to inject some data or let's say between iterations, you want to change the values of the data you're running the requests against again, there are like some advanced settings.

A

You want to save your responses, so you can see them on the logs the variable values here. uh Do you want them to persist, especially if you have different iterations or do you want in the next iteration to take like the current value etc? Or if you need cookies um now, I'm not gonna run this one. I personally don't see the value in running everything we have on the collection.

A

Unless it's for the sake of testing, you might have like a perfectly a reasonable scenario, and I would love to hear about it, but instead because I can do the same thing on subfolders, so instead I'm gonna go to the subfolder, because maybe I want to do on a specific set of tasks.

A

So, if I go and say run folder, I see the same. It's exactly the same view and I can do the same setups. Now you don't have to run everything on a folder. You can manually select items, so I'm gonna keep it to the get, otherwise it will get a little upset and the other thing is again remember: the runner runs them into a sequence, so you might want to change the order.

A

If that's something you want to do and then, if I say run what will happen, it will run this and it's showing me exactly the requests that I did run and then, if I click on one of them, I can see some details like what's in the header.

A

Yes, I did forget so here what happened is I did forget to set this to save responses. Nope, it's this one. Actually, let's see, let's do this again run this folder and because I didn't say, save responses, that's why I couldn't see them again. Let me just uncheck this and if I run this now in theory, yes, I should see something in my response.

A

Let's see this is the response. Buddy, I'm using my developer account. So this is some just dummy data that I'm using for testing, but I can see I have um things in here now. This is not particularly. I also set up a test. You can set up some tests against your collections. If that's something you need.

A

This is not very practical in like real life, you don't want to be moving the order, manually, etc, but what we can do you can set up scripts to change the order or even to pass data between requests. So basically, you can do all of that with writing, pre-request scripts and setting workflows, and if this is something of interest, I'm happy to come back after the summer break and we can do a session on that like more advanced session on scripts and workflows.

A

I owe you a session from last week anyway, so we can definitely do that now again, this is really nice and there is everything from microsoft graph and it's really organized in a nice way. But maybe you want something that is more tailored to your needs or more scenario based. Maybe you want to run something that is a mix like something related to a user, but also it's related to teams. I want to get a user or a group of users and then for that group of users.

A

I want to see, I don't know, maybe the teams they joined or I want to add them to different teams so and again, instead of manually selecting each one. What if you can create a customized postman collection from the gram, microsoft graph apis- and you still can use it with postman for that I'm going to go to graph explorer on here on graph explorer.

A

Very recently, we added the resources explorer resources explorer, as the name says, will show you every single resource available with microsoft, graph on v1 or on beta, literally everything, and what you can do is you can choose to add them to a collection. This is a postman collection. We will be adding more in the future, but for now the collection is a postman collection. So to make this very quickly, I just added a few things. This is what I added to the collection and then I can say, download the postman collection.

A

And it should be downloaded and if I go very quickly to postman, I can say import and I'm gonna upload the file and I'm gonna go. I have old collections that I'm gonna use and I'm gonna say open this and immediately. It shows me that my collection is a postman collection. I can call it whatever.

A

I want and I say import and it is adding this in here and you can see everything on that collection is in here, and this is more customized and more tired to your needs and with that I'm gonna turn back to visa. Thank you very much and again. Let me know if we want um a further session on this. Thank you excellent. Thank you. Rob on that. One really really cool stuff.