Is there any way to chain requests into a flow, or execute a request in my collection from another request's pre/post script?

[RichardFlanagan]

I have a collection where most requests require data to be preloaded so I can reference items by id ect
Right now, I'm manually running several requests in sequence that build up a data structure in the env, and reuse that for future requests.

Is there any way to chain requests into a flow?

Is there any way to chain these requests in one flow so I can just execute one setup script instead of manually running each?

execute a request in my collection from another request's pre/post script?

also is there a nice way to execute a gql request from another gql request, without manually building ajax? that could also help me break up the monolithic setup flow above, and load data on demand per request

[imolorhe]

None of that is natively possible in Altair

[RichardFlanagan]

np, do you know if there any plans to add functionality like that?

[imolorhe]

Not at the moment but happy to start a thread to discuss how that would work. I mean starting from the UI, how would it fit in?

[imolorhe]

Are there examples of that in a similar app?

[RichardFlanagan]

Are there examples of that in a similar app?

postman is an example
https://blog.postman.com/conditional-workflows-in-postman/
https://learning.postman.com/docs/collections/running-collections/building-workflows/

or bruno has some script options
https://docs.usebruno.com/testing/script/javascript-reference#request-order

these tools seem to treat the collection as executable, just like a request. I don't think altair does that currently, but that might be ok.

starting from the UI, how would it fit in?

Good question, maybe any sub-requests executed in pre/post scripts would just execute in the background and send print output to the log window? The actual gql result might not need to be rendered at all. I think something like the below would be great

>prerequest
const myRequest = altair.helpers.find("myRequestName") // maybe find a request by name or id from the saved collections?
const args = {}

altair.helpers.execute(myRequest, args) // maybe sets an env variable in it's own postrequest

const result = altair.helpers.execute(requestName ) // or we keep a reference to the response  and can process it here

The current window request can use the env vars set by the prerequest above.