Postman is a wonderful Chrome application for testing REST method calls. However it was a bit hard to get it to work for testing Rest calls with my Restlet server. Here are the gotchas I faced and havent yet figured them out completely. I love to record them so I can come back much later and they are still here ;)
1. Postman does not add the Content-Type header by itself. If you select an HTTP method which allows a body (e.g POST), it allows you to create the body and select the format (JSON/XML etc) but you must remember to add the Content-Type header.
2. If your application requires authentication, you can add that too. Postman supports basic, digest as well as OAuth (which I would love to test out next).
3. The biggest problem I ran into was when I sent XML or JSON body and the Restlet server replied back with 415 - Unsupported Media Type. The request does not even hit my application side! If you write a client application and choose the Media Type of MediaType.APPLICATION_XML and the server side method is annotated by @Post("txt:xml") it works. However, when you set the Content-Type header in Postman to application/xml it does not work. To debug this further, I installed wireshark and dumped the packet contents. I was surprised to find that the client built using Restlet framework was sending a Content-Type header as text/plain. This had to be some issue on my end. Interestingly, if I made the corresponding changes in Postman, the request coming out from that application also started to work. These are the two headers I inserted. Note that a Content-Type of text/plain still does not work. You must indicate the charset as well to make it work.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Accept: application/xml
