The (new) fastest way to get started with Postman and Box
By: Cristiano Betta
Tags: Postman, Platform, Box, API, Showcase

Postman & Box

We are pleased to announce a brand new way to use Box with Postman. We’ve launched a brand new version of our Postman collection and a new quick-start guide that makes it possible for anyone to get started with Postman and Box in less than 10 minutes.

A smarter Postman collection for Box

Postman is a popular tool that is used by developers and Box admins to make calls to the Box APIs for testing and automation purposes. The Box Postman collection is a set of preconfigured requests that makes it easier for these users to start making their first API call.

The Box Postman collection in action

The new collection is a lot smarter and a lot easier to keep up to date. It is automatically generated from our official OpenAPI specification and in simple terms this means that any time we launch a new API feature the Postman collection will be automatically updated to reflect these changes.

To make the collection a lot smarter we’ve added the following cool new features:

Integrated support for automatically refreshing access tokens when they expire. More on that in a moment.

A new folder structure that groups API calls into folders by topics, making it easier to find the right API endpoints.

Getting started in under 10 minutes

Making that first API call to Box used to be quite an undertaking as it required setting up a Box app and authenticating a user. In the past this has been one of the toughest hurdles to overcome for our users.

When we set out to overcome this hurdle we gave ourselves a goal of enabling anyone on Postman in under 10 minutes. The result of this challenge is our new Postman Quick Start guide.

The Postman Quick Start guide that gets users started in under 7 minutes!

The Postman Quick Start guide takes a user through the essential steps to set them up for using Postman with Box.

The quick start helps a user to:

Install the Postman app Set up a Box app Authenticate themselves with that Box app using OAuth 2.0 Load the Postman collection into the Box app Load their API credentials into Postman as an environment

At the end of the guide users have their Postman app set up and ready to make API calls to Box without any further configuration.

An example of a fully configured Postman environment

A better way to refresh API credentials

Finally, we also added a brand new integrated way to detect when the API credentials loaded into Postman expire. By default, a Box API “Access Token” is only valid for 1 hour, and so in the past users had to reconfigure their Postman app every hour.

The environment variable used to auto-refresh the API credentials

In the new Box Postman collection we’ve added a way for the access token to be automatically updated whenever it expires. As long as the enable_auto_refresh_access_token value is set to true , and the refresh_token value is less than 60 days old, the access token will be automatically refreshed whenever it expires.

For users who’d rather perform this refresh manually we’ve also added an alternative way to do this as well.

Feedback welcome

We already received some excellent feedback from internal and external customers, and we’d love to hear your feedback as well. We are looking to provide continuous improvements to the Postman collection and can not do this without you.

A feature we’re looking to add soon is to re-introduce some variations of API endpoints that will provide users with ready-made versions of existing requests to perform some specific tasks like creating app users, managing shared links, and moving files and folders.