Testing APIs & How Low-code tools can Help!
What are APIs?
APIs — Application programming interfaces — are a set of defined rules describing how applications communicate. Through these APIs, developers can exchange data with other applications without having to know how they work. Basically, it allows two applications to communicate, in turn combining them to perform a function based on sharing data and executing predefined processes. 🚀
API integration allows data to be exchanged between two or more applications.
Why do we need to test APIs?
The purpose of API Testing is to check the:
- Functionality
- Reliability
- Performance &
- Security of the programming interfaces.
Making changes directly to production can break your code and affect the whole product. Instead, testing APIs will help you to:
- Expose small errors that can be big problems later, issues like missing or duplicate functionality can be fixed at this stage.
- It addresses security-related issues that can be dangerous. Also, API performance testing can show issues related to response time as well.
- The failure of any API could cause services to be unavailable, processes to fail, and even access to objects and data that shouldn’t be accessible.
The fact that APIs often need to be tested for more than just user-facing functionality is often overlooked.
Best strategies for testing your APIs
Here are five best practices you can follow while testing your APIs:
- Group test cases by test category
- Test for the typical or expected results first
- Test for failure and understand how/why your API will fail
- Add stress to the system through a series of API load tests
- Try to throw as much as you can at it to see how it handles unforeseen problems and loads
How do you Test APIs with Low-code
Low-code platforms display underlying code and functionality visually with graphical user interfaces. With a low-code API integration tool, users can modify the visual elements on the graphical user interface to specify the integration’s functionality.
Changing APIs-database-workflows which are directly in production is not a good idea, as it could break the code and create bugs, and therefore testing these low-code APIs should be one of the most important factors to consider before choosing a low code platform.
There are several different platforms out there that offer different features, such as Xano, Firebase, Hasura, but the important thing is to select the one that aligns with your needs best. 👇
Testing APIs at Canonic
Canonic lets you create multiple environments so you can make all the changes you need and test them in the staging environment. 💃
When all the changes in the staging have been made, you can safely publish them to production.
After publishing, you get documentation complete with the request, response parameters & examples generated for your project. You can access the documentation by clicking on the docs tab on the left bar.
Yes, it’s that easy! Wanna try for yourself?
