The semantics of insomnia.execution.setNextRequest(), request looping

[janspudich]

Dear members of the Insomnia community,

please help me solve the following problem related to a flow of request calls when running a collection/folder in Insomnia.

Let's assume that there are three requests:

• Request A: Discover all resources, say projects
• Request B: Fetch an additional piece of information for a single resource, say project risks
• Request C: Fetch an additional piece of information for a single resource, say project issues

Now, the goal is to run the requests so that we discover all projects (using Request A) and for each project returned by Request A we fetch both risks (using Request B) and issues (using Request C). This implies a loop of the requests B and C. The number of iterations in the loop is determined by the response to a call of Request A.

These are my observations which I made while trying to achieve the goal (using Insomnia v10.2.0 on macOS):

1. When I use setNextRequest('Request B') in After-response of Reqeust C, it does not have any impact on the flow.
2. When I use setNextRequest('Request C') in After-response of Reqeust C, it loops over the request C (I can loop, at least).
3. Not strictly related to the goal but I mention it for the sake of completeness; when I use setNextRequest('Request X') in Pre-request of Request B, it does not prevent Insomnia from calling Request B first before moving to Request X (which I dare to say is not perfectly in line with the Dynamically set the next request paragraph in the Insomnia documentation).
4. Ability to skip request using pre-request scripts #7628 did not help.

Having written all that, can someone give me a guidance to achieve the goal and help me close the gap I have in understanding how setNextRequest() works in Insomnia? Is the purpose of setNextRequest() to let a user control a flow of request calls within a collection/folder run or not?

Cheers,
Jan

[subnetmarco]

@ihexxa

[ihexxa]

Hello @janspudich,

In short, setNextRequest has following behaviors:

• It can jump to any request which follows the current request, or itself (the case 2 you mentioned)
• It can not go back to any previous request. (the case 1 you mentioned)
• The request will still be sent if it is called in pre-request script (the case 3)

For your case, I assume it is allowed to:

1. Collect all risks at first (send Request B for all resources in a loop)
2. Collect all issues secondly (send Request C for all resources in another loop)

You could try something like:

• Start runner with 3 requests:
  • Req A
  • Req B
  • Req C
• When got resources from Req A, in script, set all resources as an array by insomnia.variables.set('resources', [...]).
• When calling Req B, iterate all resources saved and prepare the pre-script like:

// get the next resource to send req b
const resources = insomnia.variables.get('resources');
const idx = insomnia.variables.get('idx') || 0;
const currentResource = resources[idx];

// do something you want

if (idx+1 < resources.length) { // redirect to self to collect risks
  insomnia.variables.set('idx', idx+1);
  insomnia.execution.setNextRequest('Request B');
} else { // start collect issues
  insomnia.variables.set('idx', 0);
  insomnia.execution.setNextRequest('Request C');
}

• When calling Req C, do something similar to above.

[janspudich]

Hi @ihexxa,

first of all, let me thank you for your comprehensive response, incl. the clarification of the setNextRequest semantics.

Regarding your proposal as to how the problem declared in my original post can be solved: honestly, the approach that you are suggesting was my plan B if it turned out that my understanding of setNextRequest was complete. I was hoping that there was something which I was missing and which would allow me to iterate over a sequence of requests. Apparently, that is not the case and thus I will have to do my plan B, as you suggest.

The only thing is that the use-case as presented above is a distilled (and simplified) version of the real use-case and the amount of overhead to manage the loop for each request separately is so high that it may be beneficial to develop a plugin and reuse the code which otherwise would have to be maintained for each request separately.

What I am trying to say (without knowing the complexity behind) is that the possibility to jump to an arbitrary request in a collection/folder would make Insomnia shine in the area of similar tools. But I understand that the product roadmap is a result of many factors of which this proposal may be irrelevant.

Once again, thank you.

Cheers,
Jan