SoapUI: The Developer’s Tool for Testing and Visualizing APIs

Whenever I meet with a good friend, I hear about a new tool that makes life easier. I had coffee with David Grigsby, a .NET integration expert who works for DocuSign. David and I discussed SOAP versus REST APIs (that’s how we roll). I tend to favor REST APIs because they’re easier to visualize and develop a chunk at a time with – and reduce authentication issues. As a .NET guru, David loves SOAP since it provides much more complex operations and opportunities.

David told me the insider secret to working with SOAP application programming interfaces (APIs)… SoapUI.

SoapUI comes in two versions, Open Source, and ReadyAPI. The ReadyAPI version allows you to do everything the Open Source does but adds a bunch of productivity and time-saving features per license.

• Outline and Form Editors for visualizing data – While the Outline Editor delivers an excellent overview of the actual data in an XML message, the Form Editor provides a simple interface for entering data into requests. The two editors, in conjunction, will make your testing faster and easier.
• Data Sources – import a data source that you want to test. All major formats are supported, including text files, XML, Groovy, Excel, Directory, JDBC (Relational Database), and the Internal Grid data source.
• Point and Click Testing – methods to simplify your test creations by allowing for quick-to-use drag-and-drop functionality.
• XPath Match assertion – Creating assertions takes a few easy steps and seconds.
• Coverage – see exactly how much of the service’s functionality you’ve tested. This lets you get an overview and see which areas of the functionality are well-tested and which areas you want to spend more time with. You can also drill down further and pinpoint precisely what hasn’t been tested and what parts haven’t been asserted.
• Security testing – there’s an array of attacks those pesky hackers will throw at you, such as XML bombs, SQL injections, malformed XML, fuzzing, cross-site scripting, etc. The Security Test Generator in ReadyAPI allows you to create a complete set of vulnerability scans.
• Requirements – ReadyAPI’s requirements support is a helpful feature for mapping your tests against the business or technical requirements.
• Refactoring – solved with a simple “search-and-replace”-type function.
• SQL builder – helps you create the SQL statements with a graphical interface, making data access easy for everyone.
• Reporting – generate detailed reports at Project, TestSuite, TestCase, or LoadTest level. Print or export them into any standard format, including PDF, HTML, Word, and Excel, and customize them.
• Support – as part of the license you will also get one year of support with your license.

SoapUI testing tools make it easy to create, manage, and execute end-to-end tests on REST, SOAP, & GraphQL APIs, JMS, JDBC, and other web services, whether open source or commercial, so you can deliver software faster than ever.