In addition to our API Challenges you should practice on as many sites as possible. Try Tracks.

Tracks - A Web Application with API

About Tracks

Tracks is a Ruby on Rails application which implements the Getting Things Done productivity methodology.

Running Tracks

The application page has 'how to run instructions'.

It can be run from:

I found the official Docker image hard to get started, and also for my book Automating and Testing a REST API I used versions 2.2.3 and 2.3.0.

I created Docker images that make it easy to get started with versions 2.2.3 and 2.3.0

github.com/eviltester/tracksdocker

As a summary of the content from the above eviltester/tracksdocker repo, you can use Docker to start either version as follows:

v2.2.3
- docker run -p 80:80 eviltester/tracks:2.2.3
v.2.3.0
- docker run -p 80:80 eviltester/tracks:2.3.0

After running through docker you can access the application by visiting http://localhost:80.

If you find that you can't login or can't create an admin session then try opening the link in incognito mode... if that works then delete the "_tracksapp_session" cookie in your normal browser window.

Tracks API

The documentation for the Tracks API is available in the application itself from the help menu of the UI:

REST API documentation http://localhost:80/integrations/rest_api

The API uses Basic Authentication where you supply the username and password of the admin user you created when you started the image.

The API payloads are XML rather than JSON.

The available endpoints are:

/todos.xml
/todos/{ID}.xml
/tickler.xml
/done.xml
/hidden.xml
/calendar.xml
/contexts.xml
/contexts/{ID}.xml
/contexts/{ID}/todos.xml
/projects.xml
/projects/{ID}.xml
/projects/{ID}/todos.xml

You may find it easier to create data in the back end using the UI before issuing API requests.

Automating Tracks

Some examples for automating the Tracks API can be found in the source code for my book Automating and Testing a REST API

github.com/eviltester/tracksrestcasestudy

Exercises

Exercise - Create Data using the UI and issue `GET` requests

Create a Project
Create a Todo in the project
Issue GET requests to return information on the end points

Exercise - Create `todo` Data Using the API and `POST`

each of the GET endpoints returns an XML response e.g. /todos.xml returns an array of todos
use the todo element as a request payload with POST to create a todo
experiment with the payload to find out what fields are optional and which are mandatory
remember to GET the data to check the todo was created as expected

Exercise - Amend `todo` Data Using the API and `PUT`

to amend a todo you need to use the /todos/{id}.xml endpoint
{id} would be replaced with the id of the todo you wish to amend
experiment with the various fields and see what it is possible to amend and what it is not possible to amend

Exercise - Explore the Documentation

The API Documentation illustrates the use of the API using cURL
Try the cURL commands listed so you learn to use cURL on your machine
Some of the payloads you will send through to the API are quite large, so experiment with the -d data paramenter to read information from a file
The default response output from cURL may not include all the header information you need to check the responses. Try using cURL in -verbose mode verbose mode

Some Observations

Response Content Type

The response content type of text/html may interfere with your REST Client's ability to show the response
By returning text.html the REST Client may attempt to render the response as HTML rather than showing the raw XML
In Bruno you can view the raw response and see the XML

Request Payload

I found it interesting that I could create a todo with a duplicate id, and that it would be created with a new id, rather than reporting the attempt as a duplicate