Features

Workflow-level reference for every feature Bowire ships. Each page covers what the feature does, how to invoke it, the relevant keyboard shortcuts, and any protocol-specific caveats.

For the UI layout itself — rail strip, panes, action bar, theme — see the User Guide. For protocol-specific behaviour, see the Protocol Guides.

Navigation

• Rail strip — the 48 px column at the left edge that switches between rails; how rails are loaded, enabled, deep-linked
• Workspaces — per-project state (URLs, collections, env vars, secrets) bound to a single switcher in the topbar
• Help rail — in-workbench documentation with topic tree + server-rendered Markdown body
• Command palette — /-launcher for methods, workspaces, protocol filters
• Keyboard shortcuts — the full binding list

Making requests

• Auto-discovery — how services and methods are found per protocol (reflection, OpenAPI, SDL, MCP listing)
• Compose — the v2.1 Hoppscotch-style request builder, per-protocol layout, Library on the left, history persistence
• Form & JSON input — switching between the schema-backed form and raw JSON editor
• Authentication — Bearer / Basic / API Key / JWT / OAuth 2.0 / AWS Sig v4 / custom token provider
• Response chaining — click any value in a response to paste ${response.path} into the next request

Streaming & channels

• Streaming — server / client / bidirectional streaming with the append-only message log
• Duplex channels — long-running interactive channels (WebSocket, SignalR, MQTT, Socket.IO)
• Multi-channel manager — multiple concurrent streams open at once
• Console / log view — chronological log of every request and response

Recording & replay

• Recording — capture a sequence of calls; inspect, export, or replay them
• Replay mock server — turn a recording into a live endpoint with bowire mock
• Test assertions — convert recording steps into CI-runnable assertions
• Contract testing — publish a recording as a Pact-style consumer contract; verify the provider still honours it in CI
• Interceptor — capture every inbound request a host receives via UseBowireInterceptor() middleware (replaces v2.0 Proxy + Intercepted + Traffic)

Automation

• Flows — visual pipelines with branching, loops, assertions, and response forwarding
• Performance graphs — repeat a call N times with latency percentiles (P50/P90/P99/P99.9)

Workspace data

• Collections — group related requests for sharing and review (managed from the Compose rail Library sidebar)
• Favorites & history — star methods, replay previous invocations
• Workspace files (.bww) — the on-disk format for collections, flows, recordings
• Export & import — HAR / cURL / Postman interchange

UI & productivity

• Empty-state landing — context-sensitive welcome / retry / discovery-failed screens
• Settings dialog — per-plugin configuration organised by extension point, data paths, theme
• Responsive & mobile — how the UI adapts below 900px

Extensions

• UI extensions — payload-semantic widgets (maps, charts, audio) the workbench mounts above JSON responses
• Map widget — MapLibre GL JS viewer for coordinate.wgs84 payloads with bidirectional JSON ↔ map sync

Command line & extending

• CLI mode — bowire list / describe / call for scripting and automation
• Plugin system — building a custom protocol plugin against IBowireProtocol