Insomnia: [Question] Stringify before sending

[pinggi]

• Insomnia Version: 6.3.2
• Operating System: Win 10

Details

I need to send a json string containing a json inside to a rest endpoint.
Currently I write it like this:

"{` \"person\": { \"name\": \"Name of the person.\" } }"

but it's difficult to write it and hard to read. I'd like to write it somehow like:

return JSON.stringify(
  {
    person: {
      name: "Name of the person.\"
    }
  }
);

so I can clearly see the data to be sent and wouldn't have to escape characters.

I believe it's not possible now, so I'm marking this as a feature request.

[vlad-patras]

Is your use case to encode some json inside a json property?
Many APIs are "envelope" APIs, that is they have a JSON model and are used to carry a client-defined payload. Most clients would use JSON for the payload so we end up needing to write JSON as a string value for a JSON property.

I wrote a plugin for this use case: https://github.com/senoctar/insomnia-plugin-inception
Let me know if it works for you.

[gschier]

Woah, that plugin is very cool @senoctar!

[gschier]

One other thing that might be useful:

If you have an object as an environment variable like this:

{
  "myEnvVar": {
    "foo": "bar"
  }
}

you can stringify it using Insomnia's template language (Nunjucks) by applying a filter like this:

{{ myEnvVar | dump }}

https://mozilla.github.io/nunjucks/templating.html#dump

I'm going to close this issue as it seems like the question has been answered but feel free to follow up if it's still unclear.

[eddiegroves]

It was non obvious for me (😴) but remember you can take any helper and use that in an environment variable. So I used Response -> Body Attribute in an environment variable and then put that where I wanted with dump so that the value from the response was re-stringified (escaped){{ myVar | dump }}.