Work is rarely done at once. Some projects last for weeks if not months. Even the free-time project you have may take a few Sundays until completion. If there was something stopping our application suite from being as powerful as we would like it to be, that was the lack of some sort of storage where you can save your progress and continue later. So it makes a lot of sense to provide you with a tool for achieving this.
Introducing Projects
What makes SECAPPS great is having access to so many useful testing tools in one place. With Projects, we make it even better. Now, you have the ability to work on a project of you own spanning across multiple apps, save your progress and continue at a convenient for you time exactly how you have left it.
Demo
Introduction of a new feature would be incomplete without a quick demo, right?
For the sake of this tutorial, I will use projects inside the Rest app. Right now, the Projects feature is only available in the next- sub-domain of the website, so, for example, to access Rest, you should go to next-rest.secapps.com
Being greeted with the familiar interface, I immediately stat working on my super-important task. I have made one HTTP request and I see a red dot appearing next to the grid-like icon. This is Project's way of indicating that you have made some progress that you might want to save.
I, indeed, decide that this is a change worth saving so I click on the Project's icon. Now I am presented with a dialog, containing the root projects folder, where I will create a new folder to hold the contents of this project. Once done, double-clicking on the newly-created folder selects it as active and I am now ready to save my work!
All I need to do now to save my progress is, you guessed it, click save, give it a name and it is all done! What is great about Projects is that they are available from any app so if you are working on something in, say, HTTPView you can easily access that Rest project we have just created and continue working on it seamlessly. To distinguish between projects from different apps, simply take a look at the extension of the file as the app's name will be used for it. For example, all Rest Projects will end in .rest.
Quick Tips
Just before you rush to try our new Projects feature, here are a few quick tips that you may find useful.
Organizing your Projects
You may have already noticed that Projects closely resemble the file structure of your operating system. Well, that's because it is a file system in your browser. Advanced features like drag-and-drop, creating folders inside folders and deleting files are also present so that your Projects stay organised.
What exactly you need to save
You may have already asked yourself the question 'how often and what exactly should I save?'. The answer is - it depends on the app. For example, if you are using Rest, there is a request selector at the top left section of the app which allows you to go back and forward between all the requests done in the current session. What this means is that it is probably enough to keep everything in a single Project, because your new request is not going to override the previous ones. For apps like HTTPView, however, it is more appropriate to create new Projects for every logical part of your work. For instance, if you test multiple website, then you are probably better off using separate Projects for each of them to keep everything organized and eliminate the risk of loosing any work.
Conclusion
Projects is one of the biggest improvements to ever be made to our testing suite. We are sure that you will enjoy using it and put its multiple applications to good use!
We would like to hear you feedback so please put your suggestions in the comment section below.