Why did my API scenario write posts.api.har and not posts.har?

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Same tag, same command shape as the UI one, different filename. After recording:

text

projects/demo-shop/har/staging/products.har        926K   <- the @ui scenario
projects/demo-shop/har/staging/products.har.json     205
projects/demo-shop/har/staging/posts.api.har       97K    <- the @api scenario
projects/demo-shop/har/staging/posts.har.json        149

There is no posts.har. I assumed the extension was a typo somewhere until I went looking for the file by hand and could not find it. Is .api.har a different format, and why does the sidecar drop the .api but the recording keeps it?

har api cli

asked by Bea Lindqvist

2 answers

Accepted answer
Not a typo, and it trips up nearly everyone once.
Playwright’s HAR routing only exists on a page or a browser context. An @api scenario never opens either, so there is nothing to route from and the API client carries its own recorder and replayer instead. That second implementation writes <name>.api.har, deliberately a different filename, so that a @hybrid scenario running both layers does not have Playwright overwrite the file the API client just wrote.
So for one tag you can end up with three files:
text
```
projects/<slug>/har/<env>/<name>.har        browser layer
projects/<slug>/har/<env>/<name>.api.har    API layer
projects/<slug>/har/<env>/<name>.har.json   sidecar, shared by both
```
The sidecar is shared on purpose — it describes the recording, not the transport — which is why it keeps the plain .har.json name.
Both are ordinary HAR and both open in any HAR viewer. The API one carries an extra _sdods block per entry holding the lookup key, because the replayer matches on that key rather than walking the entries.
answered by Jide Okonkwo
The listing shows you which halves exist without you having to look in the directory:
bash
```
bun run sdods har list -p demo-shop -e staging
```
The api column is yes when <name>.api.har is present. A row with api empty is browser only; a row for a name that has no browser recording at all is API only.
The lookup key on the API side is method, normalised URL and a hash of the request body, so the same endpoint called with two different bodies is two entries.
sdods record, har, auth
answered by Reeta NandalSDODS team

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Why did my API scenario write posts.api.har and not posts.har?

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