Postman & GraphQL Playground

If you don’t already have a preference of your own, check out the ScandiPWA tool recommendations for testing, debugging and database management.

Recommended tools:

Topics covered:

GraphQL Playground Features

GraphQL Playground is an IDE for learning and using GraphQL. You can download the latest release for your platform of choice - Mac, Linux or Windows.

Features:

  • Ability to store schema, tabs and workspaces.

  • ‘DOCS’ section lets you preview GraphQL queries, type details and specific fields of a schema.

  • The ‘SCHEMA’ tab allows you to preview the GraphQL schema and download it as a file.

    • You can parse through ‘SCHEMA’ using regular expressions and search for ‘DOCS’ using the search field.

  • Ability to add multiple URLs

  • ‘PRETTIFY’ code feature

  • Request history

  • Support for HTTP headers and query variables

    • Send requests with HTTP headers by adding them as a JSON object in the ‘HTTP HEADERS’ section.

Drawbacks:

  • No proper error handling

  • If your GraphQL server responds with a non-json error you’ll see:

"error": "Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0"
  • In this case you can ‘Inspect Element’ with the Inspector and you’ll see how the request is sent in the ‘Response’ and ‘Preview’ tab. In this case it’s:

502 Bad Gateway

Postman Features

Postman is a user-friendly tool for API testing. If you’re not sure whether or not this tool is for you, just ctrl + F your request here.

Some of the major features are:

  • Test writing

    • See the full error logs right away, not only for POST requests, but also for GET requests.

  • Executing multiple simultaneous requests

    • Useful for finding bugs that happen radomly, i.e. in a specific period of time.

Database Management Tools

The team of ScandiPWA recommends DBeaver for Linux. You can check out the user-guide here.

MySQL database management application for Mac - Sequel Pro. Read how to get started here.

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