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Using Postman for calling a SOAP Web Service

So testing Web Services and REST APIs is not something that I have regularly spent a great deal of time doing (although I have done some). However, a change to a customers requirements meant that I had the opportunity to test a SOAP Web Service in a little more depth. Now I have used Postman to test Rest APIs but I had not used it to test SOAP Web Services. I wasn't sure If I could do it but I thought I would give it a go... 

So in this post I will show how you can use Postman to test a SOAP Web Services via the postman UI and the sendRequest method.

 So what did I do?
The service I will use for this blog post is one provided by W3schools which converted Celsius to Fahrenheit and Visa Versa. Here it is :) 

 https://www.w3schools.com/xml/tempconvert.asmx

So first of all I had to work out how to call a SOAP Web Service using postman. So a quick look on the Postman web site and I found that I needed to:

  •  Set the URL to be the Soap Endpoint
  •  Set the request method to POST
  •  Open the Raw editor and set the body type as text/xml
  •  Enter the SOAP message in the request body

So my request looks like this:


However, this did not work. The content-type key in the header of my request was defaulted to application/xml and I had to change it to text/xml. After changing this I got a response. 

 Here it is:
So happy days!!! I have called a SOAP Web Service using Postman. 

 However, what happens if I want to call another SOAP Web Service using a value returned from the Fahrenheit to Celsius as a parameter. Well Postman makes it easy.....

 Postman provides a pm object and within this object is a method called sendRequest. This allows you to send a request to a service using Javascript. This sendRequest method can have the following parameters:

 url - This is the URL of the service you want to call
Method - This is the request method (POST, GET etc..)
Header - The header values
Body - The body of the request

 So for my example my code looks as follows:

I added the above code to the Tests scripts tab so that when my original request returns the Celsius value, this test script will run. It takes the Celsius value returned by the FahrenheitToCelsius call and uses that as the Celsius value in the CelsiusToFahrenheit call. 

 So the 2 lines at the top of my Test get the Celsius value from the response of my original web service call and place it in a variable called Celsius. The body of the service call is populated with the SOAP message for the CelsiusToFahrenheit service call and the Celsius value is put into this message via the following piece of xml:

 + Celsius + 

This sendRequest will now send a CelsiusToFahrenheit SOAP Webservice call using the value in the Celsius variable as the Celsius. 

 The final piece of my code in the tests tab looks like this:

What this piece of code does is tests that the response from  CelsiusToFarenshei is equal to 100. 

 So there you go. A nice example of how Postman can be used to test SOAP Web Service calls as well as how you can call a SOAP web service from within the tests section of a request using a variable that was populated from the response of the original request.





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