Tutorial: Postman Runtime Components

This is information about some of the internal & external constructs in Postman Runtime. At a high level, Postman Runtime contains a few major components, each of which controls a different part of the actual collection run.

Runner

The Runner is in charge of initializing a run. It takes care of sanitizing the input collection, extracting the Items to run and manipulating the iteration data based on the number of iterations. Finally, it returns a Run object.

Cursor

Internally, every collection run is represented as a 2D array of requests:

               +------------------- Current Request
               |
               v
       0   1   2   3   4   5   ......
     +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
  0  |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
     +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
  1  |   |   | * |   |   |   |   |   |   |   | <----- Current Iteration
     +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
  2  |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
     +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
  3  |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
     +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+

The cursor points to a unique request in the collection. Every trigger that is called when sending an Item will have the corresponding cursor as a part of its arguments.

Every cursor has a ref property, which is a UUID. The ref is unique to each item, and is always updated when runtime moves in the grid (either to the next request, or because of postman.setNextRequest() usage in the sandbox). The same request in different iterations will have a different ref.

Run

This is the handle to controlling and manipulating a collection run. It holds the entire state of the run (the currently running request, all requests to be run, current iteration, etc.)

If a run needs to be paused, resumed or aborted, the Run object provides the ability to do that.

It also allows you to lookup an Item using its cursor.

Requester

The HTTP requester is in charge of actually sending requests. It is in charge of sending requests, maintaining the cookie store, adding additional information to the request, etc.

The requester can be configured with additional options to control the request behavior, such as enabling redirects, ssl certificate verification, etc.