Introducing the New Data Editor

The Postman Team

February 28, 2017

With more than 3 million developers using Postman, we’ve learned that working with large amounts of data can be cumbersome and time consuming. Our users have expressed usability concerns around viewing large JSON responses, adding or editing variables, and working with key-value pairs in general.

It’s time to step back, and look at the experience we want to provide our users. Supporting data viewing and editing is a necessary and fundamental first step. For people who work with data frequently, spreadsheets are a familiar framework and therefore inspires a lot of the enhancements to the data editor.

Today, we’re introducing a new – and more powerful – data editor in Postman! This new editor is an enhancement to the key-value editor and lets you view and manipulate data in a faster, more effective and elegant manner.

Visual enhancements

We’ve configured the available horizontal and vertical space more effectively to optimize the data that can be displayed up front.

Relevant features will display for a specific row on hover.  This reduces clutter in the interface and helps the user focus on the most relevant data.

Select multiple rows by simply dragging your mouse

Keyboard shortcuts to supercharge your workflows

Support for bulk actions

You can now select and copy multiple rows. Then go ahead and paste them in a different place (e.g. params) and check out what happens for yourself 

View information up front

We want to display the information you want to see up front. If you navigate to a place with a large amount of data, the UI element auto expands to show the complete information. This is implemented in the data editor as well as the URL bar.

Ability to resize columns

You can now change the width of the key and value columns by dragging the boundary on the right side of the ‘key’ column header.

This new editor is out on our Canary build, and will hit our stable builds in early March. Latest Canary builds are available for OSX (x64) / Windows (x86 or x64) / Linux (x86 or x64) / Chrome. Go ahead, download and let us know what you think.

We have a LOT of new feature releases planned to build on top of this editor, capabilities inspired by things you already do using spreadsheets. We can’t wait to see how you use this editor, and would love to hear how this affects your workflows.  We’re continuously listening on Twitter, GitHub, Slack and our support channels!