Array support in environment variables

[anotherglitchinthematrix]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Yes, I can't directly reference the defined array in the environment variables. Instead of directly referencing the array, we can only reference the elements of the array like in the example below.

{
  "instances" : ["instance 1", "instance 2", "instance 3"],
}

Insomnia dosen't let me to use the instances array directly, instead of it serves the elements of the array like istances[0], istances[1], istances[2]

Describe the solution you'd like
Make it possible to directly reference the arrays, instead of pointing the elements of the array.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[starx]

@anotherglitchinthematrix Any update on this? It is a useful feature to have.

[dimitropoulos]

Aren't environment variables only ever allowed to be strings? see: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap08.html

I'm sorta thinking that we shouldn't allow the current behavior, actually.

[anotherglitchinthematrix]

The issue was about https://support.insomnia.rest/article/170-environment-variables

[starx]

@dimitropoulos May be we can call it something like environment_collection to not go against the semantics?

[dimitropoulos]

sorry, was reading too quickly! thanks for clarifying :)

[dimitropoulos]

Could you say more about your use-case? Is instances cloud compute boxes? Why would you need to send an array as an environment variable and what would the resulting string (since the value of an environment variable can only ever be a string) look like?

[anotherglitchinthematrix]

It's been a while since I opened the issue and I barely remember why I needed it, but I think I was trying to send a push notification to couple of test devices and wanted to define an array to hold the device identifiers and reference that array in the request body as-is. I thought it would be possible to use a reference to array since the environment variables are defined as JSON objects and they can contain another objects, arrays, numbers, booleans, reference to other environment values etc.

[herrigor]

In my case I work with equipments we can send commands to, and the backend knows what equipments I'm sending a command to with an array of identifiers. The graphql backend expects an array. It would be much better to have a list set in enviroment variables as we can change those on a environment by environment basis.

And as @anotherglitchinthematrix mentioned, as the variables are defined as JSON objects it would make sense to accept and use arrays as arrays and so on

[starx]

In my case, I am defining roles for a user I am expecting to create via an endpoint. Depending on environment I need to create different types of users with different roles to do test.

[dimitropoulos]

re:

It's been a while since I opened the issue and I barely remember why I needed it

I apologize. We're doing our best to go through every issue and get caught up. Thanks for helping explain your recollection of it!

[SohamJ]

I have a use-case where we are sharing requests across multiple users. In that case, we'd like the actual request definition to be static and any variables be defined in the environment files.
That way, the source repo changes only when the request schema is updated and per-request changes don't trickle into the changeset (note: insomnia doesn't support scratch requests like postman so that the one-off user changes can be discarded)

For example, if the request takes a json array with dynamic properties, those could come from the environment instead of hardcoding them in the body itself.

Sample body now:

{
  "labels": [
    "foo", 
    "bar"
  ]
}

Proposed structure with this change pulling labels array from environment variable labelList

{
  "labels":  {{ _.labelList }}
}

environment file:

{
  "labelList": [
    "foo", 
    "bar"
  ]
}
  

[KuznetsEnvy]

re:

It's been a while since I opened the issue and I barely remember why I needed it

I apologize. We're doing our best to go through every issue and get caught up. Thanks for helping explain your recollection of it!

One more use case is Shopify GraphQL with list field types.
Documentation can be found here https://shopify.dev/api/admin-graphql/2022-07/mutations/metafieldsSet
The correct (example from their documentation https://shopify.dev/apps/metafields/types) value for a field of type list.product_reference would be
[
"gid://shopify/Product/1",
"gid://shopify/Product/2"
]

And Shopify GraphQL library for PHP works fine with this kind of query. But Insomnia shows error: expected value of type "String".

[einarpersson]

I came here looking for the same thing. I have an array of "region_codes" which is used in a filter when making a POST request. I want to be able to reuse this across requests but cannot find a way to do so currently. When adding it as a environment variable I can only reference the individual elements, not the whole array.

[Zcehtro]

I came here for the same feature request! In my case I'm using an array of account identifiers, group identifiers and subgroup identifiers. These are produced by the backend and specific to each user!

I think it would be amazing have a quick access menu so that after I get the response from the API, I can see the environment variables that are loaded and select which array element I want to work with on the other endpoints!

[Zcehtro]

If this could go an extra mile, it would be amazing to parse text strings from JSON property values into arrays to be then loaded into the environment!

[grandmasteri]

I came here for the same thing. I would really like to reference a whole array defined as an environment variable and not just specific elements of the array. This would be useful for making requests where one of the request parameters is a list of strings.

[davidimhoff]

Any update on adding this feature? I think it would be greatly appreciated @dimitropoulos

[dimitropoulos]

sorry: I no longer work on Insomnia... BUT! the team that does is really awesome and I'm certain that this something their aware of. There are genuinely thousands of little things like this that could be done in any given moment so it's all a matter of prioritization. Submitting a PR usually does a lot to help something jump up a little higher in priority.

[gran0123]

I came here for the same thing. I want to use a full array when sending an API request and avoid specifying each elements.