anssip/dispatch

A REST API testing desktop app

Dispatch

A tool for REST API design, and for request testing and management. This is a tool similar to Postman, Insomnia and Paw. It has unique templatating mechanism with reusable request building blocks.

Available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Learn more: https://www.dispatch.rest

Dispatch is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. See the download options.

Status

Version 0.1 released June 24th 2019.

Roadmap

Next major release

• Persist requests in some kind of DB

• Requests to have IDs

• GraphQl

• Requests can pull data from other requests (response bodies, headers, etc.) and place them in the payload, URL, headers. This is done with Mixins.

• Request chaining

• Request body editor to show context entries in color, Mixins in color

• persist variablers table column widths

• request timing

• prettify command for the context editor

• multiselect requests & run them

• Support ctx templating also for text bodies

• Git/GitHub integration making it easy for teams to share the Dispatch projects.

dispatch's Issues

Automatic updates

The kitze/react-electron-example template that was used to kickstart this project had this code to enable automatic updates: https://github.com/anssip/dispatch/blob/master/public/electron.js#L20

This should be tested. In Macs, it requires the code based to be signed and for that, I need to register (and purchase?) an Apple Developer account.

Prettify command for the context editor

The context editor does not prettify the JSON object in any way. We support only JSON for the context.

There is already ajson-pretty.js module that can be used here.

Add "About Dispatch" and Quit menu items

The About Dispatch should display a dialog with following info:

Dispatch logo
Dispatch v. 0.0.1
(c) Norhtern Peaks Development Oy, 2019

We have a preliminary logo in the dispatch.rest repo. The app has dialog & modal things happening in the ApplicationController.js file

Code signing is needed for the Windows build

Now when installing, it complains. Electron-builder is able to do code signing for windows.

request search field

The filter/search field in the sidebar request list needs to be made functional. Currently it does nothing.

Extract values from other requests

We will use JS functions for extracting values from other requests. These values can then be used in the current request in the request URL, headers, or in the request body.

We can provide a list of ready-made function templates for common use cases. The users can then modify them to suit their needs. The template could for example extract a value from a request body JSON object. The template contains a path to the JSON node/value to extract, and the user is able to modify this path.

Fix context templating for non-JSON request bodies

Currently does not seem to fill from the context when "Text" body type is used. Would be good if it would fill the template from the context and also fill from the environment and request specific variables.

Intellisense aka autocomplete

Implement autocomplete support for the body editor. Should offer autocomplete hints to use a value from the context or to refer to an environment variable.

CodeMirror has the "show-hint" add-on that can be used here.

Test on Linux and Windowz

perhaps on some virtual machine

Window title remains to show the old project filename after choosing "New project"

Window title remains to show the old project filename after choosing "New project". It should empty the title and behave like applications usually behave when "New project" is selected from the menu.

Other things also seem to be broken when trying to create a new project after some existing project has already been open. The environment variables are not cleared when a new project is initialised.

Overall, the app should handle an empty state (no requests, no env, no context, no auth) better.

Website

Create a small website for Dispatch. I have the domain dispatch.rest reserved for this.

Started already working on this in the dispatch.rest repository. It's based on gatsby.js (react) and uses this gatsby universal starter.

A small todo is here.