Simple Workflow automation with Autovars

Often when working with APIs, there is a sequence of requests that are each dependent on the previous response. This can be really annoying during testing, resulting in a lot of copy-paste between endpoints, or weird tool-specific custom scripts. Callosum autovars provide a way to automatically extract values from a response, and copy them to a variable for reuse. This is enabled within the tool by applying a JSON Pointer (e.g. that identifies which field of a JSON response to extract) to every response received.

Callosum defines autovars through the use of an OpenAPI Link object named x-6a-autovars attached to the endpoint response data. The operationRef for this Link is set to https://ref.callosum.dev/autovars to ensure that any tools using Links have multiple avenues to identify the content.

Example:

paths:
  /posts/{postId}:
    get:
      operationId: get-post
        responses:
          "200":
            content:
              application/json:
                schema:
                  $ref: "#/components/schemas/post"
            links:
              x-6a-autovars:
                parameters:
                  "@userId": $response.body#/userId
                operationRef: https://ref.callosum.dev/autovars

Here’s short video loop showing what this looks like in the Callosum app!