New, More Useful Activity Feed in Postman Collections

Kasey

October 27, 2016

Postman customers tell us they really appreciate the Activity tab – where they can see all recent changes, updates and additions to every collection shared within the team. And the Activity tab just got more useful and detailed, based on feedback from our users.

Line by Line Changes Detailed

In case you haven’t used it, the activity feed is accessible for every collection by clicking of the right arrow icon to the upper right of the collection name.

Clicking here would get you a chronological listing of activities affecting the collection. Below is a screenshot of the original Activity Feed, which recorded who made changes, to what, and when it was completed. This is a big help in letting everyone know when a collection is changing, so you can proactively keep up with development.

With this release of Postman, the Activity Feed is far more detailed, including line by line changes, within the context of the element of the request that was changed. In the example below, you can see the changes made in the “Weather to Slack Demo” Collection – additions in green, deletions in red.

Each change is detailed by section of the request, and the line by line additions/deletions are outlined. In this case, the first change we made was to the input address supplied to the Collection. We changed it from the Postman office address in San Francisco (415 Jackson Street) to the address of Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.

Then we updated the Slack posting to properly reference the new address, and changed the emoji that would accompany the new Slack post. You can see how the addition/deletion is organized right next to each other, so they are easily compared, helping the user parse and understand the changes more quickly.

Lastly, we went back and updated the description of the collection. Again, here the changes are automatically placed right next to each other, under the section of the request that was changed.

Upcoming Additions to the Activity Feed

While this represents a huge improvement in the Activity Feed, we have plans to make this feature even more useful in the future. In particular, we will be adding tagging – the ability to specify a particular version of a collection to refer back to later. This will create a snapshot in time of the Collection, and with that, our plan is to create the ability to roll back the collection to that tagged version. With these features, your Postman Collection will have version control that will allow your team even more flexibility with your API code development within Postman Cloud.