Capturing IFS Aurena requests using Postman

Invoking IFS Aurena projections from 3rd part tools like Postman has been a challenge so far and my current finding so far is that calling a projection requires session cookies and it does not work with OAuth2 token.

I was searching for alternate ways of invoking IFS Auera calls and found that the Postman Interceptor is really cool tool and you can invoke all IFS Aurena invokes without any addition step. Here are the steps you need to follow in order to capture Aurena invokes with postman.

Setting up Postman Interceptor

Download and install the Postman Chrome extension

verify whether you have it installed in the Chrome Extensions

Setting up Postman Interceptor to capture IFS Aurena requests
step 1 - add Postman chrome extension

Open Postman and click on the Satellite Icon

Setting up Postman Interceptor to capture IFS Aurena requests
step 2 -Open Postman Interceptor

Go to the Requests tab ,Toggle Source to the Interceptor. If the Interceptor extension is properly installed, you can see the Interceptor Connected with green dot
Toggle Capture Requests to ON
Select an Collection to save the requests
If you have many tabs open, it’s good to have some filter to define, but tit’s not mandatory.

Setting up Postman Interceptor to capture IFS Aurena requests
step 3 -Setup Postman Interceptor Request capture

Now go to the Cookies tab, set Capture Cookies ON and add your IFS domain

Setting up Postman Interceptor to capture IFS Aurena requests
step 3 -Setup Postman Interceptor Cookies capture

Now we are all set with setup capturing IFS requests with Postman!

Capturing IFS Aurena requests

We’ll see how to capture the Aurena requests Master Part record

Capturing Aurena Server Requests for Query a Part Record

You should see the captured requests in the Interceptor Chrome extension and typically the call on top should be the corresponding server call to GET the part details.

Capture IFS Requests using Postman Interceptor

Open Postman and check the collection you specified the requests to save in previous step. You can see all the server calls made from Login until the Part record is retrieved. This can use as a alternate troubleshoot tool in addition to IFS debug console.

Captured IFS Requests using Postman Interceptor

Open the GET request for PartHandling.svc/PartCatalogSet. As you can see everything you need to execute the request from Postman is already there (Query parameters, column list, Auth headers, cookies) and you can Invoke the request.

Note: If it return HTTP 401, logout from IFS and login again. I’m not sure what happens underneath but it seems like the cookies are incorrect. When you re login to IFS Aurena, Interceptor will refresh cookies and it worked for me.

IFS Aurena projection response for Master Part

Capturing Aurena Server Requests for Creating a New Part Record

Similar to querying the Master Part record, create a new part and Save in IFS Aurena.

Check the request in Postman. You can see how the input JSON looks like for a new master part record. By changing the part No, we should be able to create new parts in IFS.

Postman request to create new part in IFS Aurena

Capturing Aurena Server Requests for Deleting a Part Record

Similarly, delete request can also captured and send from Postman but deleting a record required the key (part_no) and the etag.

ETAG can be obtained using below query format

SELECT 'W/"'
|| utl_raw.cast_to_varchar2(utl_encode.base64_encode(utl_raw.cast_to_raw('W/"' || objid || ':' || objversion || '"')))
|| '"' etag
FROM PART_CATALOG
WHERE PART_NO = 'TEST01'

Modify the If-match header with the ETAG and then should be able to execute the DELETE operation

IFS Aurena delete request format in Postman

Some Tips…

Cookies

I’ve noted that the following cookies should be available to properly execute the request without errors.

If the cookies are missing, then you can re-generate them by Logout from Aurena, clearing cookies from Internet Options and login again.

X-XSRF-TOKEN mismatch

If you get any error like below, most possible cause could be token mismatch.

"code": "CSRF_ERROR",        "message": "A security error occurred while processing the request."

To avoid this error, check the XSFR-TOKEN cookie and see if it matches the X-XSRF-TOKEN header value

Hope you find this post useful and will add some value for IFS Aurena debugging and developments. Please comment with your thoughts on any suggestions and improvements needed.