Removal of Postman from REST API documentation

Hey Developers!

I’m Dan, an Engineering Manager from the Ecosystem Platform. Our team focuses on improving the development experience for Atlassian. One of our current focus areas is improving the product REST API documentation. In order to make progress here, we first have to clean up shop a bit.

Today, we’re announcing the removal of the “Run in Postman” button across all documentation sets. For quite some time now, we have seen low usage of this functionality to the point where maintaining it doesn’t make sense. We hope that by simplifying our documentation offering, we can refine existing experiences and improve the holistic experience of developer.atlassian.com.

If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear from you!

Cheers,
The Ecosystem Platform Team

5 Likes

Hi @danielwinterw

That’s a real shame, because I was able to learn and develop some simple but really useful python scripts based on what I learnt using Postman.

Would it be possible to see if Postman (the company) or a community could take over this feature?

All the best

James

2 Likes

Hey James,

Thanks for sharing your feedback. I did a bit of digging, and it seems that Postman supports importing Open API 3.0 spec. See more here: https://blog.postman.com/postman-supports-openapi-3-0/

In theory, you can download the Open API spec on the REST API documentation page, and import it in postman manually. I just gave it a go with Jira, and it worked :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Dan

4 Likes

That’s a pitty - I have probably used the button three or four times, b/c once you have (most) of the API in Postman there is no need to go back through the website and re-import the api definition every time …

Make sure to document that you can import the Open API spec and that the URL is not something you have to dig out (like the WAML files on server). Every time somebody joins a dev team or wants to automate something that is needed and that person should not have to be an Open API professional or internet archeologist to find out how it’s done.
If that will work with any compliant tool in the future - even better …

Chris

6 Likes

I liked this too, but I’ve just realized it was there a few months after started using the APIs.

Maybe highlighting this feature would be a better solution than removing.

3 Likes

@danielwinterw

Exactly what I wrote earlier - you have to be an internet archeologist and poke around URLs to find the Open API spec for Confluence - https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/swagger.json
Why can’t it be just linked? It is not obvious - and it is also not the same for other products …

1 Like

Hi @christoffer,

The swagger files are linked in the REST API documentation under the page menu.

09%20am

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thanks for pointing out my stupidity :man_facepalming:
To say it with Louise Glücks words:

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

I was clearly looking at memories while opening the REST API docs

1 Like