Exporting APIs, Documenting Interfaces and Capturing Low Level Traffic in ReadyAPI

Documenting Interfaces📌

The "Generate Documentation" feature allows us to create HTML documentation for the service interfaces and store it in a file.

Follow the steps below to create a documentation file.

1️⃣In the navigator panel, right-click on the interface(in this example interface is ServiceSoapBinding) and select "Export WADL" from the context menu.

2️⃣Now, in the "Create Documentation" dialogue, browse the "Output Folder" and click on "OK".

3️⃣After clicking on "OK", you can see the report (wsdl-report.html file) in the browser.

Capturing Low-Level Traffic🤳

Sometimes, you may need to learn which data was transferred(sent or received) during network communication. In "ReadyAPI", you can capture packages passed through a network device over the TCP(Transmission Control Protocol).

Note ⚠️- The feature is available only on Windows computers.

Requirements✅

Follow the steps below to be able to record low-level traffic.

1️⃣Check if "ReadyAPI" is running or not. If it is running, then close it.

2️⃣Now, you must download and install the WinPcap or Npcap driver. As WinPcap is no longer maintained, Npcap is recommended to use.

3️⃣Now, let us run the "ReadyAPI" with administrator privileges.

Record Low-Level Traffic⏺️

Follow the steps below to start recording low-level traffic.

1️⃣Select the APIs node and then select "Tools" from the main menu and click on "Traffic Capture".

The "Traffic Capture" dialogue will be as shown below.

2️⃣In the dialogue shown, select a device before starting to record the traffic Here you can also record packages transmitted to or from the specific host by selecting a specific host from the "Filter by host" list.

3️⃣You may enable the "Save" to log directory option if you want to export a traffic dump. The traffic dump will be saved to the file in the "<User-Name Folder>/.readyapi/logs/" directory.

4️⃣Click on "Start" to start the recording.

Now the utility will intercept all the packages transmitted via the selected device, so there is no difference if you interact with the host or use ReadyAPI to send requests.

5️⃣Click on "Stop" to stop the recording.

Analyse Recorded Traffic🔎

Fine! You have stopped the recording. So far, so good. What next?

Now you can see the recorded list in the dialogue box.

The content on the left-hand side contains the recorded packages list. When you click on listed packages, you can see their package details on the right-hand side. And for packages with HTTP data, HTTP content is also shown.

We hope you have learnt what we can do after we modify an API. Wait! Do you still have doubts? Keep going.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is "ReadyAPI"?

"ReadyAPI" is one of the products of "SmartBear". It is an easy-to-use no-code API testing platform designed to streamline the testing workflows.

Is "ReadyAPI" open source?

"ReadyAPI" includes third-party open-source software modules subject to their respective licenses.

What is "SmartBear"?

"SmartBear" software is an American privately-held IT company that delivers tools for APM(application performance monitoring), software development and testing, API testing and management.

What does API stand for?

API stands for Application Programming Interface.

What is the use of API?

API is a software intermediary that allows two different applications to communicate.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed exporting APIs, documenting interfaces and capturing low level traffic in ReadyAPI. We learnt exporting to WSDL file, exporting in the Swagger or OpenAPI format, exporting to SwaggerHub, exporting in the WADL format, documenting interfaces and capturing low-level traffic in ReadyAPI.

We hope this blog on exporting APIs, documenting interfaces and capturing low level traffic in ReadyAPI was helpful. You can refer to other similar articles as well - 

• Adding more APIs to existing projects and extending them in Ready API
• Discovering APIs in Ready API
• Managing APIs in Ready API
• REST Requests in Ready API
• Why is Postman so Popular Among Developers?

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