Generate .http files

[svrooij]

It seems like a lot of us are switching to .http files to test their apis. What if Kiota could generate those files? So you can test your api during development right from Visual Studio or VSCode (with an extension)?

Use http file in Visual Studio for a great description of what those files should look like. Not sure how many of those files you would be generating for a complex api (1 file vs 1 file per path segment)

Related to this comment

[baywet]

Hi @svrooij ,
Thank you for bringing this up .
This is something we've talked about internally multiple times over.
One outstanding question we had was is this something that should only be part of the extension itself or should it be part of a core generation engine so people can also generate those HTTP files from the CLI?
Also when you mention everybody switching in your observations, what are they switching from?

[svrooij]

Separate! If I want multiple languages I'll just run the tool twice

[baywet]

I know we're talking about a significant amount of work here but is this something you'd be interested in working on?
Also thank you very much for all this insightful feedback.

[sebastienlevert]

@svrooij, this is something we're looking at right now actually! Thanks for sharing your POV on this! Would you want to generate JUST the http snippets, or it would always be combined with an API client (or plugin) generation?

Would you want to have "just" the http files or if we were to add some extra context around id that could help with self-documenting the API, would that be useful?

[darrelmiller]

No leading the witness @sebastienlevert ;-)

[svrooij]

@baywet my time is kind of limited until oktober, seeing all the open-source projects I'm contributing to at the moment.

@sebastienlevert in the end it's all clever text templating. Being able to generate a strong typed client for various languages, with the documentation embedded into it is a big leap. Generating the http files to use during development would be a next good step.

Generating per endpoint documentation a'la the graph documentation is not something I personally would use (because I hope all clients contain the correct descriptions)

I see more value in a javascript webpage that loads the api specs and displays it in a webpage for all other developers to read and try. (SwaggerUI, Scalar, Redux)

@darrelmiller while it might look like witness tempering, I don't feel influenced 😉