Request Builder
The Request Builder is the central workspace in OptraFlow for creating, managing, executing, and organizing your API requests.
The Request Builder is the central workspace in OptraFlow for creating, managing, executing, and organizing your API requests. Whether you're testing a single endpoint or validating an entire collection, everything starts here.
This page gives you an overview of what the Request Builder can do. Each capability is covered in more detail in its own section — use the links below to go deeper.
Add requests, your way
OptraFlow supports several ways to bring requests into your workspace, so you can start testing in seconds regardless of where your API definitions live today.
| Method | What it does |
|---|---|
| Manually Add Request | Build a request from scratch — choose the HTTP method, enter the endpoint URL, and configure headers, authentication, query parameters, and body. |
| Import from OpenAPI / Swagger | Upload an OpenAPI Specification or Swagger definition to instantly generate requests, with schema validation available out of the box. |
| Import from Postman Collection | Bring in an existing Postman Collection — or one exported from the OptraFlow Network Interceptor extension — and preview it before importing. |
| Import using cURL | Paste a cURL command and OptraFlow automatically extracts the method, URL, headers, authorization, query parameters, and body for you. |
Once a request is created or imported, click Send to execute it. The response panel shows the response body, HTTP status code, response time, response size, and payload size — everything you need to verify the call behaved as expected. Requests with unsaved changes are flagged with a red indicator until you name them and save them to a collection.
You can also export any request or collection, making it easy to share your setup for debugging or to hand off as documentation.
Validate responses with smart assertions
Go beyond a simple status-code check. Assertions let you validate responses at two levels:
- Field-level assertions — check individual fields in the response payload for expected values, types, or patterns.
- Response-level assertions — validate the response as a whole, such as status codes, headers, or timing thresholds.
Assertions run automatically every time you send a request, giving you immediate pass/fail feedback.
Reusable variables
Requests rarely stay static. OptraFlow supports both static and dynamic variables that you can use directly inside your payloads, headers, and URLs, so you don't have to hand-edit requests every time you run them.
- Dynamic variables generate a new value on each run — useful anywhere you need fresh, unique data. For example, when testing a "register new user" endpoint, you can use a dynamic variable to generate a unique email or username for every test run, avoiding "user already exists" failures and letting you create as many new accounts as you need without manual cleanup.
- Static variables stay fixed across runs. For example, using the same password for every test user makes it much easier to debug — you always know the credentials for any account the test suite created, without having to look them up.
Chained requests
If you're running a sequence of requests where one depends on another, OptraFlow also supports extraction variables — you can extract a value from one request's response (like a user ID or auth token) and automatically pass it as input into a subsequent request in the chain.Auto auth, applied across a collection
Instead of configuring authentication on every request, Auth Orchestration lets you define authentication once at the collection level. OptraFlow automatically applies it to every request underneath, so you can test protected APIs without repetitive setup.
Collection management and export
The Collections panel is where all your saved requests live, organized for easy browsing, updating, and reuse. From here you can also manage and export entire collections — useful for sharing your test setup with teammates or archiving it alongside your API documentation.
To validate a whole collection at once without stepping through each request individually, use Quick Test.
Schema and business rule validation
If your requests originate from an OpenAPI Specification, OptraFlow can automatically verify the response schema against that spec, catching contract mismatches early.
You can also define custom business rules — validation logic specific to your API's domain — and have OptraFlow check every response against them.
Security, performance, and reliability testing
Beyond functional correctness, the Request Builder supports dedicated testing modes for production-readiness:
- Security Scanning — checks requests and endpoints for common vulnerabilities.
- Rate Limit Testing — verifies how an API behaves under repeated or high-frequency calls.
- Performance Analysis — measures response time and payload characteristics under load.
AI-powered documentation and insights
OptraFlow can generate API documentation directly from your requests and collections using AI — no separate documentation effort required.
You'll also get a running summary of each collection, showing what's been tested and what hasn't, so you always know where coverage gaps remain.