Welcome to the how-to guide about using Postman for our APIs. In our various tutorials, how-to guides and getting started pages, we recommended you use Postman. This is because Postman has our entire library of endpoints. Everything has been set-up and is ready for you to use. It’s extremely simple. In this how-to guide, we’re going to show you how you can make API requests with Postman. We'll show you various GIFs for visual guidance besides text. You’re going to need the following:
Sportmonks API token
Postman account
Download the Sportmonks API collection. The following link is for the Football 2.0 API collection.
In, case you don’t have a Postman account. No worries, you can simply create a Postman account when you’re directed to that link.
Open the GIFs in a new tab, for the full resolution versions.
Click on ‘environmental quick look’, indicated with the eye icon. Next, you go to globals and edit. In the globals section, you name the variable ‘api_token’ and for the initial and current value you simply add your API token. Click on save and you’re good to go.
The API token will be added automatically to every request you make in the future, which is super convenient. Your requests will always be authenticated this way.
Now to test whether you successfully added the API token or not, we’re going to make a request in Postman. Go to our Soccer API collection and choose an endpoint. For this guide, we’ve chosen the teams by id endpoint. For your convenience, we have already added an example team id for you. The example ids will always be of a team, season, or player that is available in our Free Plan. Other than that, you can freely add includes. Simply click on the include query parameter and then insert a value.
Hit the blue 'send button' and it will send your request!
We offer extra information about the endpoint, which includes are available, how many nested includes you can use and whether the endpoint contains pagination or not. You can check out our API reference guide for this info.
We include standard filter options. You can simply check a filter and then type what you want to filter on. For example, with the fixture by id endpoint, you can filter on the parameter 'markets' and 'bookmakers'.
Simply check market and then add any value you would like at the value bar.
We’ve also made it possible for you to make API requests via a plethora of coding languages. Simply click on the ‘code’ button on the top right corner, directly down below ‘save’.
We hope the gifs are helpful in assisting you with navigating through our Postman collection. If you happen to have any questions, feel free to contact our technical team!
We also offer you example responses for every endpoint! Simply click on the examples tab located in the top right corner.
It can be handy to save the response, instead of having to continuously re-open Postman and making new requests. That’s why you can simply save and download your response!
You can also choose to save a specific request and have it added to your SportMonks API collection. In this example, I request the season id of the Champions League and then save it as such.
If you've followed all our tutorials and previous how-to guides, you should now have a basic/intermediate understanding of how our API works. For example, you should be able to make requests, filter requests, and enrich responses.
Armed with the knowledge from our how-to guides, you can finally start building your own application.
In our various how-to guides, we've shown you some developer tools. But how can you use them exactly? That's what we'll be discussing in the following chapter.