How to complete the Delete All Todos Challenge

This challenge requires you to delete the last todo item. This actually means you need to delete all the todo items.

There are many ways to do this and some automated execution is probably required.

Automated With Java RestAssured Example

I have an automated Java execution using Rest Assured to complete this:

• C058DeleteAllTodosTest.java

This uses a bunch of abstractions to keep the code simple but the basic process is:

• GET the /todos and create a list of all the ids
• Issue a DELETE request for each of the /todos/id

        TodosApi api = new TodosApi();

        List<Todo> todos = api.getTodos();

        for(Todo todo : todos) {
            api.deleteTodo(todo.id);
        }

Completing Challenge Client Tools

It is possible to complete this challenge manually by issuing all the requests by hand.

Some tools have the ability to issue Data Driven requests, so if you can parse the GET response and create a list of ids then you could use the data driven feature of the tool.

• Bruno Data Driven Testing
• Postman Data Driven Community Posts

Most of the API client tools also have the ability to create scripts to achieve this.

Deleting All todos using Command Line Tools

I'm going use standard Linux/Unix/Bash commands here.

I can use a combination of curl, jq, and xargs to achieve what I want.

• cUrl command line HTTP client
• jq a command line JSON processor
• xargs piping parameters into commands examples

I can use all these linux commands on Windows using a WSL ((Windows Subsystem for Linux)[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about]) which means I can use the same commands as a mac and make this solution portable.

I'm running Ubuntu in my WSL

First issue a curl request to get the todos in API challenges.

If I don't know how to create the culr command I can generate the curl command easily by using Bruno to generate the code (most REST Clients also have this feature).

• create request in Bruno with the X-CHALLENGER header
• try it out
• right click on the item in the left side bar and Generate Code and then choose Shell-Curl

curl --request GET \
  --url https://apichallenges.eviltester.com/todos \
  --header 'X-CHALLENGER: 07466215-9bab-4bf4-9b7d-34b7ac765915'

Replace the X-CHALLENGER GUID with your GUID

I will actually save the response into a file to make it easier to work with.

curl --request GET \
  --url https://apichallenges.eviltester.com/todos \
  --header 'X-CHALLENGER: 07466215-9bab-4bf4-9b7d-34b7ac765915'
  > todos.json

The response is JSON, I want to parse that JSON to find all the ids, because I'm going to use that list of ids to delete them all.

I will use JQ for that.

The command below iterates over all the items in the todo array and extracts the id

jq '.todos[].id' todos.json

I can save this list to a file

jq '.todos[].id' todos.json > ids.txt

Then if I cat ids.txt I can see all the ids

> cat ids.txt
1
8
5
2
6
3
9
7
4
10

I then want to call curl for each of these values and I can use xargs to do that

cat ids.txt | xargs -I % curl --request DELETE \
  --url https://apichallenges.eviltester.com/todos/% \
  --header 'X-CHALLENGER: 07466215-9bab-4bf4-9b7d-34b7ac765915'

I can double check that I have deleted them by looking at the API Challenges progress page.

Or just call the GET /todos and see an empty array

> curl --request GET \
  --url https://apichallenges.eviltester.com/todos \
  --header 'X-CHALLENGER: 07466215-9bab-4bf4-9b7d-34b7ac765915'

{"todos":[]}

Or I could do it all in one command:

curl --request GET \
  --url https://apichallenges.eviltester.com/todos \
  --header 'X-CHALLENGER: 880c5857-dbff-4266-b419-701efa804679' |
jq '.todos[].id' |
xargs -I % curl --request DELETE \
  --url https://apichallenges.eviltester.com/todos/% \
  --header 'X-CHALLENGER: 880c5857-dbff-4266-b419-701efa804679'

Delete All Todos Using Command Line Tools Video

Watch on YouTube: "Solution to Delete all Todos in default format"

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