Hi and welcome to this video on
improving API documentation. An important
part of API quality is having good
documentation in place. The documentation
helps users know how your API works and
how they can use it. Postman provides a
way for you to create and share
documentation. So let's take a look at
this using this world time API call that
I have here, and I have to find a
location for as Europe and the area here
as London. So we can send this request,
let's go ahead and send that off, and we
get back this response. Now the first
thing that we want to do with our
documentation is get some examples. So
let's go ahead and add an example here,
well at an example and it'll use that
call that we just sent. For our example
let's call it get London time, and then
we'll save this example. So now that we
have this example saved, I'll go ahead
and click on the arrow here beside the
collection, and then we can click on the
first request here and edit it to see
the description. So the description here
has time information, and I've put this
in already to show us this endpoint
takes area and location. Now this is
using something called markdown to
format it, and so the starstar will make
these be bold. You can look there's a lot
of information about how to use markdown
if you want to format your documentation
nicely. So let's go ahead and close this
out, and let's see what it looks like. So
let's click on the view and web button
here, and that brings up the web page for
us. And you can see this web page has the
information that we put, so it's got this
time information these are in bold as we
told it to, and over here is example. So
you can see it's created this example
for us, and it gives us it in see URL, and
it shows you know that how to send the
call with that. And then the example
response that we had saved as well. Now
if we wanted to we could look at it in
other ways, so we could look at it and
Python and see what it would look like
to send this request in Python, and so
this can be a very helpful way for you
to figure out how to do it with the
particular type of system that you're
working with. So if you're working with
jQuery, or node, or PHP you can
generate the requests in an instant, just
copy them from here and use them
directly in the code that you're working
on. Now by default this documentation is
private, but you can also publish it or
share it with your team if you want to,
doing this allows you to create a shared
source of knowledge with your team, and
that's a great way to make sure that
everyone knows how the API works. So in
this video we've learned about how to
create documentation quickly and simply
in Postman. And the next video we'll look
at how we can use Postman to do API
monitoring.