EP 49 : Use .http files in Visual Studio
Read Time : 1.5 mins
How do you test your APIs in .NET , answer could be
Postman
Swagger
Unit testing
What if I tell you we have new way to test our APIs
.NET 8 Web API with default .http file
Using .http file we can test our .NET APIs, although this option was available there since a long time, but I noticed it when I have recently created a .NET 8 API .
It is by default created with .NET 8, it looks like this :
What is the purpose of this file
As per Microsoft docs .http file editor provides a convenient way to test ASP.NET Core projects, especially API apps. The editor provides a UI that:
Creates and updates
.httpfiles.Sends HTTP requests specified in
.httpfiles.Displays the responses
How does this file looks like
By default this file contains this code :
We can add new variable by using at the rate (@) sign and use it.
Three hash tags (###) are used as delimiter to tell this file that previous API has ended here and we have other API after that.
How can we send the request ?
Run your project and then click on Send request and on right side you would see the results of your request.
On similar fashion we can add other requests for other HTTP Methods
OPTIONS
GET
HEAD
POST
PUT
PATCH
DELETE
TRACE
CONNECT
How to add headers and body ?
We can add header in key : value style. And to add body we can use curly brackets {}
To learn more about how to set environment files, user secrets and azure key vault check out Microsoft Docs.
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