API Gateway Features

API Gateway provides these key features:

• Support for REST APIs and SOAP APIsAPI Gateway supports REST-based APIs and SOAP-based APIs. This support enables organizations to leverage their current investments in SOAP-based APIs while adopting REST for new APIs. The API Gateway’s SOAP to REST transformation feature enables an API provider to expose parts of the SOAP API or expose the complete SOAP API with RESTful interface. API Gateway allows you to customize the way the SOAP operations are exposed as REST resources.
• Secure APIsAPI Gateway protects APIs from malicious attacks initiated by external client applications. Administrators can secure traffic between API consumer requests and the execution of services on API Gateway by filtering requests coming from particular IP addresses and blacklisting specified IP addresses, detecting and filtering requests coming from particular mobile devices.
• Policy enforcementAPI Gateway provides complete run-time governance of APIs. API Gateway enforces access tokens such as API key check, OAuth2 token and operational policies such as security policies for run-time requests between applications and native services. API providers can enforce security, traffic management, monitoring, and SLA management policies, can transform requests and responses into expected formats, and collect events metrics on API consumption and policy evaluation. API Policies can be defined globally and applied to a set of APIs. With API Gateway you can also define policy templates that can be applied across APIs.
• MediationAPI Gateway provides routing policies such as content-based, and context-based, for run-time requests between applications and native services. These policies perform routing and load balancing of incoming requests to an API.
• Message transformationAPI Gateway lets you configure an API and to transform the request and response messages to suit your requirements. To do this, you can specify an XSLT file to transform messages during the mediation process. You can also configure an API to invoke Integration Server services to pre-process or post-process the request or response messages.
• Easy discovery and testing of APIsAPI Gateway provides filter capabilities to quickly find APIs of interest. API descriptions and additional documentation, usage examples, and information about policies enforced at the API level provide more details to the developers that help them decide whether to adopt a particular API. Developers can use the provided samples and expected error and return codes to see how the API works.
• Clustering supportMultiple instances of API Gateway can be clustered together to provide scalability and high availability.
• Built-in usage analyticsAPI Gateway provides information about Gateway-specific events and API-specific events, details about which APIs are more popular than others. The Gateway-specific events information is available by way of dashboards to users. With this information, providers can understand how their APIs are being used, which in turn can help identify ways of improving their users’ experience and increase API adoption.
• Packages and PlansAPI Gateway provides capabilities to create and manage packages and plans. This helps the API providers in providing tiered access to their APIs to allow different service levels and pricing plans. Users can view the details of the package, such as included APIs and associated plans. Plans provide information about pricing and quality of service terms defined within them. Consumers can subscribe to any plan available under the package, based on their business needs.
• Functional PrivilegesAPI Gateway allows you to assign functional privileges to a user or group (LDAP or local) using teams. The functional privileges are grouped together to form an team, which is associated to a group. You must have a functional privilege assigned to perform any of the key API Gateway features.
• API MashupsAPI Gateway allows you to consolidate services and expose them as a single service. You can create API mashups that extend an API operation by grouping it with other API operations available in API Gateway.

Tenant Management

Software AG provisions API Cloud in two different platforms based on your geographical location:

• • Integration Cloud

• • Software AG Cloud

The above mentioned platforms have their own Tenant Management Systems to authenticate users. Once a user registers with API Cloud, the corresponding Tenant Management System initiates the user registration process.

Searching Data

The search feature in API Gateway is a typeahead search—a simple and easy to use search facility where you can type the text of interest to search. You can search for all items that contain one or more specified keywords (that is, text strings) in the item’s properties. Some of the properties are name, description, version, key, value, and so on in the API.

You can also search for these data types: APIs, applications, aliases, plans, and packages.

To search for an item, simply type a string in the search box in the title navigation bar. A list of search result is displayed directly below the Search box. The number of matches found are displayed in five sections depending on the type they fit in: APIs, Application, Alias, Packages, and Plans. A minimum of five search results are displayed in each category. If there are no results as per the search string typed, a message displays saying so.

If you find what you are searching for in the search result box, click on it to view the details. You are navigated to the specific page that displays more information. For example, if you are searching for an API and click the displayed result, you are navigated to the specified API details page. If you are searching for an application and click the displayed result, you are navigated to the specified Application details page.

If you want to see all the search results click Show all results in the search result box. The Advanced search page is displayed. This is a dedicated page that displays extensive search results. In the Advanced search page, you can search or filter the results in the following ways: by type or keyword.

• By type: Select one or more types in the left navigation pane to see search results pertaining to the selected types. For example, if you select the type APIs, all the APIs that have the specified string is displayed.
• By keyword: Type a keyword in the Search by keyword field, all the search results containing the specified keyword are displayed in the list. For example, if you type the keyword petstore, all search results containing the petstore would be filtered and displayed.

Note: You cannot search for REST resources and methods in a REST API. The search function only works for the name and description of the REST API. For example, you can search for a REST API named LibraryAPI. But you cannot search for a REST resource named book or a REST method POST within the REST API. However, the search function works for name, description, and operations of SOAP APIs.You cannot search for resources and methods of an OData API.

Configuring the Number of APIs listed on a Page

You can configure the number of APIs that get listed per page in the Manage APIs or the Manage applications page. In each of these pages, you can use the pagination bar at the bottom of the page to navigate from one page to another, the first page, or the last page when there are more than 20 APIs in the list. To change the number of APIs listed in a page, select the required number in the Show # results per page field in the pagination bar at the bottom of the page. The API list now displays only those many APIs in one page as specified. For example, if you select Show 10 results per page, only 10 APIs are listed in one page.

This configuration that you change through the drop down is maintained as long as you are logged in to API Gateway.

The value is set in the drop down is applicable for both APIs and applications listing. For example, if you change the show results to 10 in the Manage APIs drop down, then the number is retained for Manage applications page as well.

Using Help

API Gateway’s built-in context-sensitive help gives an overview of the functionality of API Gateway.

You can access API Gateway Help link by expanding the menu options icon  , in the title bar and selecting Help. This opens the introduction to the webMethods API Gateway page in the help system. You can browse the required topics in the navigation pane. Click on a topic to display the detailed information. You will also find the help links in the form of a help icon  on several pages of the API Gateway user interface. Click the help icon  on the page to view the corresponding detailed information.

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