How to use the Insomnia CDRouter Web API workspace

Insomnia is a free, cross-platform graphical REST API client which is a great tool for learning the CDRouter Web API. QA Cafe has created an Insomnia workspace that can be imported which contains examples for every CDRouter Web API endpoint. The Insomnia workspace is a great tool to augment our existing CDRouter Web API documentation for learning the CDRouter Web API.

To begin, install Insomnia by following the directions on the Insomnia website. Next, save this exported CDRouter Web API workspace to your machine. Import the workspace into Insomnia by selecting Import/Export from the purple pull-down menu in the top-left. In the dialog box that appears, select Import Data and navigate to the cdrouter-web-api.json file that you previously downloaded. Press Ok on the Import Succeeded dialog box that should appear after a few seconds. Next, switch to the new CDRouter Web API workspace by selecting To CDRouter Web API under SWITCH WORKSPACE from the purple pull-down menu.

You should now see a list of API endpoints organized by resource type in the left-hand sidebar. The last thing you need to do is configure Insomnia with the location and credentials it will use when sending API requests to your CDRouter system. Select Manage Environments from the No Environment pull-down menu below the purple pull-down menu in the top-left. In the dialog box which appears, edit the base and token fields with the URL to your CDRouter system and a valid API token for your system. You can ignore the token field if you have Automatic Login enabled. Please note that if you specify base as an https URL and are using a self-signed certificate (the default), you will need to uncheck Validate SSL Certificates in the App Settings dialog box from the purple pull-down menu. Once you have set base and token appropriately, you can close the Manage Environments dialog box. To test that Insomnia is correctly configured, select the List configs endpoint from the left-hand sidebar and press Send. A green 200 OK and a JSON response body should populate the right-hand sidebar.

Now that Insomnia is properly set up, feel free to experiment. You can quickly search for API endpoints with the Filter box underneath the No Environment pull-down in the top-left. Feel free to change the URL, URL parameters, headers and request bodies of any of the API endpoints and see how those changes affect CDRouter’s response. Some endpoints have template parameters such as {{id}} or {{name}} in their URL. These are configured by selecting Environment from the pull-down menu of the enclosing folder in the left-hand sidebar. These template parameters make it easy to work with the same resource when experimenting with different endpoints by setting the template parameter to that resource’s ID or name.

If you want to clear any customizations you have made to the workspace, simply delete the CDRouter Web API workspace and import it again. Delete the workspace by selecting Workspace Settings from the purple pull-down menu and then pressing Delete Workspace twice in the dialog box that appears. Once the workspace is deleted, simply import it again by following the above instructions. Please note you will need to configure your base and token environment settings again.

Please see the Insomnia documentation for more help on using Insomnia.