Mocking Legacy & Third-Party APIs

The Problem: Your startup is building a new integration with a legacy banking API (or a rate-limited third-party service like Stripe). The sandbox environment is incredibly slow, frequently goes down, and has strict rate limits that block your CI pipeline.

The Mock-First Solution: Capture the real responses once, and serve them locally at 0ms latency for the entire team using Mockzilla.

1. The Capture Phase

Instead of reading a 400-page manual for the legacy API, make a real request using your browser with the Mockzilla Chrome Extension active.

1. Open the Legacy Dashboard: Go to the third-party sandbox.
2. Trigger the Request: Click around to trigger the API calls (e.g., "Fetch Account Details").
3. Capture & Sync: Open the Mockzilla Chrome Extension, find that exact request, and click "Sync to Dashboard."

Mockzilla automatically creates a new folder and a new mock with the exact headers, status code, and JSON payload the real API returned.

2. The Refinement Phase: Snapshot to Living Mock

The captured data is static. To make it useful for testing multiple scenarios, transform it into a Dynamic Mock.

1. Go to the Mockzilla Dashboard.
2. Edit the newly captured mock. Change the path to a wildcard (e.g., GET /v1/accounts/:id).
3. Switch to the JSON Schema tab. Mockzilla can convert that static payload into a dynamic blueprint:

{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "account_id": { "type": "string", "faker": "string.uuid" },
    "status": { "type": "string", "enum": ["ACTIVE", "FROZEN", "PENDING"] },
    "balance": { "type": "number", "minimum": 0, "maximum": 10000 },
    "currency": { "type": "string", "const": "USD" }
  },
  "required": ["account_id", "status", "balance"]
}

3. The Result: A Local Playground for the Team

Now, point your app to http://localhost:36666/api/mock/legacy-api/....

• Speed: 3-second legacy calls now take 5ms locally.
• Reliability: CI/CD pipelines never fail because the sandbox is down.
• Cost: Avoid hitting rate limits or usage charges for third-party sandboxes.
• Team Portability: Since Mockzilla runs in Docker, you can commit the data/ folder to Git. Your entire team gets the exact same mocked environment instantly.