Postman | Get started with 4-Heights® Conversion Service
How to get started with the 4-Heights® Conversion Service using Postman
Postman is a free-to-download tool for making HTTP requests. It can be used for testing and getting acquainted with any REST API such as the one offered by the 4-Heights® Conversion Service.
Set up the system
1. Download and install the 4-Heights® Conversion Service.
- Download: Free Trial
- More detailed instructions: Manual
2. Download and install Postman.
3. Import request collection to Postman
- Download collection: Postman Collection
- Open Postman and click Import.
- Drag downloaded collection to import window.
- Click on 4-Heights® Conversion Service in the Collections view.
Try it out
1. First, ensure the baseURL in your collection variables specifies the host where your 4-Heights® Conversion Service runs.
2. Have a look at the available requests: API Reference
3. To get acquainted with Postman, try out a simple request: list available workflows.
- This is useful for gaining an overview of the available workflows.
- The name of a workflow can then be used as an input parameter when creating a new job.
4. Process your first file (for more information about the job processing sequence, please refer to the section "API Usage" in the Manual)
- Create new job with a workflow of your choice.
- The job is created and ready for data.
- The id of the newly created job is saved in the collection variable jobId and used automatically for subsequent requests.
- Get job info to verify that a job was actually created.
- The response should tell you that the status of the job is "created".
- Add data to job (choose file in Body tab).
- You can repeat this step several times with different files in order to add more data to your job.
- Start job
- The conversion service will start processing all the documents you added to the job.
- Get job info again.
- The response should now tell you that the status of the job is "completed" (or "processing" if you added large files and it has not finished yet).
- Get job result to receive information about the result (like events that happened during conversion).
- The id of the first result data set is stored in the collection variable resultId and used automatically in the subsequent request.
- If your workflow returns more than one result data set, copy all ids.
- Get job result data to receive the actual document generated by the conversion service.
- Save the response as a PDF file to view it (click on Save Response, then Save to a file on the right hand side).
- Delete job to free up any resources used for processing it.
- All collection variables associated with the job are reset.