Consumer interaction – Digital Transformation with IBM API Connect-1

You have put in all of this work designing, developing, testing, and organizing your APIs and they are finally published and waiting for the world to discover them! It is this interaction that is just as critical as all of the previous steps you have taken to get to this point. It is how the end consumer sees and interacts with your published Products and APIs that will make all the difference. Are they well organized and easily discoverable? Did you use proper descriptions and keywords for them to search on? All of this matters when the consumers are trying to discover your APIs. In this section, we will look at the consumer’s interaction with your Developer Portal so that you can get an idea of how they will navigate, search, and interact within the portal.

While developing your APIs within APIC, you are working within a provider organization that you are a member of. Just like we have provider organizations containing developers who provide the APIs, we also have consumer organizations. A consumer organization is just what you might think it is – an organization containing members who wish to consume your APIs. For a developer to subscribe to a Product or Plan, they must be part of a consumer organization. You can create a consumer organization in one of two ways: you can create it yourself, or you can invite a user to become a consumer organization owner. That user would then accept the invitation and create the consumer organization.

No matter which way you create your consumer organization, you must have the proper privileges to do so. You can refer to Chapter 11, API Management and Governance, to learn more about permissions. Assuming you have the proper access to create a consumer organization, you can create the consumer organization within the Developer Portal itself or the API Manager. Since we have been working in the API manager, let’s take a look at how to create a consumer organization there. You must begin by navigating to the Catalog that you wish to add the consumer organization to. Remember, each Catalog provides a Developer Portal, so you will need to configure the consumer organizations at the Catalog level, as follows:

  1. From the API Manager home screen, navigate to the Manage Catalogs | <Catalog to add the consumer org> | Consumers tab. From this screen, click the Add button at the top right and select Create organization or Invite organization owner, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 10.27 – The Create organization or Invite organization owner menu options

2. If you select Invite organization owner, you will add the email address to send the invitation and the recipient will follow the link to create the new consumer organization.

If you select the Create organization option, you will be presented with a basic configuration screen for your new organization, where you will provide the organization’s name and the owner of the new organization. This user can be a new or existing user. You can also select the user registry where the owner’s user ID can be found. The following screenshot shows an example of a new consumer organization that’s been configured for our DEV Catalog, which is where we are adding a new user:

Figure 10.28 – Creating a new consumer organization

When you’re creating a new user as the owner of your new consumer organization, you will need to provide additional information, such as the user’s email address and password. Once this has been filled out and submitted, you will receive confirmation that the consumer organization has been created. At this point, you will see your new consumer organization in the list, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 10.29 – Consumer organization creation confirmation

  1. Now that your consumer organization and user have been created, the owner can log into the Developer Portal and invite users to join the consumer organization.
  2. Once your consumer organization has been created and your users have been invited, you can start to discover APIs. As you already know, you can discover and subscribe to APIs and Plans within the Developer Portal. When you first log into the Developer Portal, your home screen will provide you with a single snapshot containing some valuable information, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 10.30 – Developer Portal home screen

In the top-right corner, you can see the consumer organization you are logged into. If you happen to be a member of more than one consumer organization, you can switch to them via this dropdown link. From this dropdown link, you can also view information about your current consumer organization or create a new consumer organization, provided you have the proper privileges.

In the center of the screen, you can see a snapshot of some Products that you can explore. Clicking the View All link under the Explore Products heading will reveal all the Products within the consumer organization. This is a nice, single pane of glass where you can get an overview of the consumer organization.

3. Before you start discovering your Products and APIs, you will need to create an application. You can think of an application as a collection of Products that you subscribe to. To create an application, from the Developer Portal home screen, click on the App link from the top navigation menu. This will bring you to a list of the current applications that you have created. If this is your first application, this list will be empty, as shown here:

Figure 10.31 – Application list

From this screen, you can click the Create new app button at the top right to navigate to a screen where you can provide some basic information for your new application, as shown here:

Figure 10.32 – Create a new application

  1. To create a new application, you must provide a name for your application. You can also provide an optional description for your new application, as well as filling in the Application OAuth Redirect URLs(s) field. This is optional, and you can add one or more OAuth redirect URLs, though if more than one is added, the application must provide the OAuth redirect URL in the request. For more information on OAuth security, please see Chapter 7, Securing APIs.
  2. Clicking the Save button will complete your new application configuration and bring you to a confirmation screen, which will let you know that your new application was created successfully, as shown in the following screenshot. More importantly, this screen will provide you with your client ID and secret for the APIs within your application. Be sure to copy these now as they will only be displayed once. If you fail to copy these, you will need to reset the client ID and secret to be able to obtain it:

Figure 10.33 – Application creation confirmation

3. Clicking the OK button will bring you to the main screen for your new application. This screen will show your client ID and any Product and Plan subscriptions. Since this is a new application, this list will be empty.

Now that you have created a new application, you can begin to discover and subscribe to new Products and Plans. You can browse the available APIs in a few different ways. If you are viewing your application home screen, you will see a link after the No subscriptions found text saying Why not browse the available APIs?. Clicking this link will bring you to a list of available Products that you can subscribe to. Alternatively, you can click the API Products link via the top navigation menu. A third way to get to the available Products screen is from the Developer Portal home screen, as we saw in Figure 10.30. No matter which method you use to get to the available Product list, you will be presented with a list of Products that you can subscribe to, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 10.34 –API Products

As you can see, our list only contains one Product. As you develop and publish new APIs and Products, this list will grow. As you can see, you can also filter the list and sort it by using the filter and sort criteria fields at the top of the screen. Now, you can subscribe to any of the available Products, as follows:

Related Post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *