November 19, 2016
The biggest feature in the release is the new support for external parameters.
Previously, it was possible to configure and use default parameters and parameters extracted from the HTTP request. This release introduces the concept of parameters providers. Through providers, API Simulator now can use parameters from external data sources. This feature makes it even easier to model flexible API simulations by using elements of Test Data Management (TDM).
The API Simulator distro includes support for parameters from CSV (comma-separated values) files and RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems).
API Simulator loads CSV files into an in-memory database for fast access. We also have working code that uses Excel as the source but it requires Apache POI (poi-ooxml in particular) which we currently do not include in the API Simulator distribution. Please contact us if for some reason exporting Excel files to CSV is not an option for your use cases.
SQL queries to fetch parameters from some relational database can be built dynamically with query arguments embedded in the SQL statement, or they can be parameterized SQL statements with ‘?’ placeholders for argument values.
There is performance hit in terms of response time when using a remote relational database compared to an in-memory database. Of course – a remote database is the option to use when the dataset is too big to fit all in memory.
API Simulator v0.3.0 Release Changes
- New feature to fetch parameters from external data sources. Out of the box support for CSV files and relational databases.
- Support for regular expressions to pattern-match elements of an input.
- Support for octet-stream input.
- There is no more need to specify script extension when running a script (e.g. .sh/.bat).
- Fixed a problem with the scripts for some Mac OS X configurations.
We invite you to learn more about API Simulator, download and install it, and run the examples. Why not even create API simulations to help your own testing and development?
Let us know what you think at [feedback at APISimulator.com]. Many thanks for your interest and support!
Happy Simulations,
The API Simulator Team