Understanding API <-> OAuth 2.0 relation through Postman

In the last?post, we went over the basics of the OAuth 2.0 framework, why it’s required and how to work with it. In todays Part 2 of the series, we will be demonstrating how one can use tools like Postman to interact with APIs that mandate the use of OAuth 2.0 authorization framework. In the next post, we will be writing actual code in Python to implement what we are demonstrating through Postman today. As I’ve said suggested many times before, one needs to be well versed with tools like Postman/SoapUI in order to understand the logical structure of APIs. We’d be inviting trouble for ourselves, if we jumped straight into the coding phase.

For the remainder of this series, we will be focusing on?Cisco’s “Software Suggestion” API. This API provides us the necessary information regarding?recommended software upgrade path?for a particular Cisco product. This makes our job easy when we are planning upgrades and going over multiple new versions and trying to determine the best one to upgrade our systems to. We can leverage the power of this API by automating the manual efforts and let Cisco tell us which software version would be best for us. This can save us valuable time which can be devoted to doing something else which is more productive.

Note?: This is just one of the APIs that utilizes OAuth 2.0 standard. There are tons of other APIs out there belonging to different products and vendors. So, you don’t necessarily stick to this one. The objective is to make readers familiar with the working of OAuth 2.0 based APIs and how to code for such scenarios. You can apply these principles or methods to any other product as well.

The table of contents is given below. You can click on the links to jump to relevant sections

1. Use Case
2. Stage 1 : Registering an app with Cisco
3. Stage 2 : Using Postman to interact with the API

To read the article in full, please visit the following link