Create a batch of ground devices

This article explains how to use Postman to create multiple devices in a ground at once.

Story

One of the common maker challenges is to automate your home. For example, monitor loudness level in your house. You’ve assembled 8 devices, and each device measures loudness of each room in your house.
Now you want to connect the devices to AllThingsTalk Maker, so you can develop neat monitoring solution for you and your family.

Instead of manually creating a device resource in Maker for each of your devices, you want to automate the process and save some precious time.

What you’ll need

To follow the article you’ll need:

• AllThingsTalk Maker account
  • Sign in, or sign up for a free account
• Postman - a friendly GUI for constructing API requests and reading responses
  • Download and install the app
• CSV editor
  • Any app which can create a CSV file, e.g. Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel etc.

Create batch of ground devices

Here are the steps you will do:

1. Create CSV to specify your devices details
2. Get ground credentials
3. Setup API request in Postman
4. Run the batch requests in Postman
5. Verify your devices in Maker

Create CSV file with devices details

Create a CSV file to specify each device name and title. It should look like this:

It’s important that you use deviceName and deviceTitle as column names, because Postman will use those variable names.

Get ground credentials

Once in Maker, choose a ground where you will create your devices. From the left-hand side navigation select SETTINGS page.

Copy GROUND ID and GROUND TOKEN. You’ll use those credentials to authenticate Postman client and create your devices in the ground.

If there is no Ground token generated for the ground, click GENERATE NEW TOKEN .

Setup API request in Postman

Run Postman and add API request to create a ground device using AllThingsTalk open API.

• On the left-hand side, under Collections tab, click + New Collection
• Inside the collection, click Add requests and name it, e.g. Create ground devices

• Set POST as the request method
• Set api.allthingstalk.io/ground/NYzFLolKLvHNA6D28CG0CJ6c/devices as the URL endpoint
  • Make sure to use your GROUND ID from Maker in the URL
• Under Headers tab, add 2 items:
  • Content-Type: application/json
  • Authorization: Bearer maker:4PhbVzqJ6rhQG0lqFwolzhqedJoxbLspD72WkOf
    • Make sure to use your GROUND TOKEN from Maker in the header

• Under Body tab, specify device specs, e.g.:

  {
      "name": "{{deviceName}}",
      "title": "{{deviceTitle}}",
      "description": "A device for monitoring home loudness.",
      "activityEnabled": true
  }
  

  • deviceName variable will use values from deviceName column from your CSV file
  • deviceTitle variable will use values from deviceTitle column from your CSV file
• You can optionally test if the response code is correct by adding a following line to the Tests tab:
  tests["It returns 201"] = responseCode.code === 201;

Run the batch requests

In Postman, in the top left corner select Runner. It fires a request (or the whole collection) through a number of specified iterations.

• Choose your collection, and Create ground devices request
• Since your CSV file has 8 rows, one for each of your device, set the Iterations to 8
• In Data, select the CSV file that you have prepared
• To check how Postman parses your CSV click Preview; it should look like this:

• Once you’ve verified that everything is fine, click the button Run to run the batch
• The Postman will grab pairs of deviceName and deviceTitle from the CSV for each row, and fire 8 requests towards AllThingsTalk API
• After that’s done, you should see a successful report:

Verify your devices are created

In Maker, you should see 8 new devices in your ground:

Where to go next?

Now you can learn how to implement those new devices and start getting your data in Maker.