Publishing and configuring Catalogs – Digital Transformation with IBM API Connect

As we discussed in Chapter 3, Setting Up and Getting Organized, a Catalog is simply a logical partition for all of your API development within APIC. You can organize this in any way you see fit, though a common and useful way to use your Catalogs is to partition your different development environments. A Catalog will contain your Products, which will contain your APIs, so your Catalog will be one logical unit that will contain everything related to your APIs. This partition also carries over to the Developer Portal, where your APIs and Products are discovered, and is also part of the URL that’s used to request an API. So, you can see how Catalogs provide the segregation and isolation required for different environments. You can refer back to Chapter 3, Setting Up and Getting Organized, to understand the importance and methods for organizing your Catalogs.

When setting your Catalogs, you need to understand what type of environment it will be used in. For example, will it be in a development environment, where it will be frequently changing and requires few approvals or restrictions? Or perhaps it will be used to house Production APIs and Products where rigid approvals are required and changes are less frequent? This is important to establish since it is within the Catalog configuration that you will set these permissions and approval requirements.

When you first create your provider organization, it will contain a default Catalog named Sandbox. As its name implies, this is a sandbox Catalog for you to experiment with and get started. This is not a Production-ready Catalog and should only be used for development activities.

To create and configure your Catalogs, from your API Manager home screen, click the Manage Catalogs tile. This will list all the currently configured Catalogs in your provider organization. To create a new Catalog, click the Add button in the top-right corner and select Create Catalog. At this point, you can give your Catalog a name and click the Create button.

Once your Catalog has been created, click on it, and then click the Catalog settings tab to reveal some basic settings for your new Catalog, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 10.22 – Catalog settings

As you can see, there are a few toggle switches that you can configure:

  • Production mode: Setting this switch to On will indicate that this is a Production Catalog. When you’re publishing Products to this Catalog, it will check for any conflicts and reject the publish action if any are found.
  • Spaces: Enables spaces for this Catalog. You learned more about spaces in Chapter 3, Setting Up and Getting Organized.
  • Default: When On, this option makes this Catalog the default Catalog so that calls to APIs within this Catalog can be called with a shorter URL by omitting the Catalog’s name. Only one Catalog can be the default Catalog.
  • Application lifecycle: Switching this to the On position enables life cycle approvals. This means that you can configure what life cycle actions require approvals. This is the one setting that will change in each environment. For example, your development environment will likely not require approvals as you need to empower developers to rapidly develop their APIs through the life cycle in the development environment. In your Production environment, however, you will likely require approvals for every life cycle action.

Once the Application lifecycle toggle is set to the On position, you can click the Lifecycle approvals link from the left navigation pane and then the Edit button to specify which actions will require approvals. The following screenshot shows this screen, where we have set this Catalog to require approvals for all actions:

Figure 10.23 – Lifecycle approvals

One final configuration you must add before you can publish your Catalog is that you must add a gateway service. This can be accomplished by clicking the Gateway services link from the left navigation menu when viewing your Catalog settings. From here, you can add the appropriate gateway service.

Now, you know how your Catalog configuration should change based on the environment that it is to be used for. Now, let’s take a look at how we can add our APIs and Products to a specific Catalog and publish them.

Related Post

Leave a Reply

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