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Categorize your APIs: Tips and Tricks

| Christoph Wiechmann |
categorize your APIs

There are many reasons it makes sense to split up or categorize your APIs into different sections in the API Portal to improve the user experience for the API Developer.

Categorize your APIs

READ MORE: Configure your API Portal, video explanation.

  • For instance, when the API Portal is connected to multiple API Managers hosting Production APIs and Sandbox APIs, it makes sense to split them up in different sections. With that, you can also control that, for instance, Sandbox-APIs can be tried using the Try-It interface, but not Production APIs.
  • Or there is a large amount of APIs in the API Catalog and it becomes unhandy to search for the right API.

READ MORE: API Portal, get the facts!

Category APIs into the different section is something you can do with an OOTB API Portal in an Upgrade-Safe-Way.

This eight-minute video is showing it:

Hide elements for some users

The API Portal will hopefully become the central entry-point to the API Economy of the customer and therefore I promote to have one API Portal instead of multiple ones.

READ MORE: Configure your API Portal, video explanation.

Some reasons for that:

  • Avoid splitting up the API Community into different portals. Let them go to ONE portal.
  • The API Portal is more than just the API Catalog. All Blog-Post, Forum-Post, Pages, etc. would be split up and must be maintained on all portals.
  • Maintaining the API Portal is already a hard job and doing that for multiple portals is even more difficult.

But to have only one API Portal, it’s important to be able fine-grain control who can see what and it should not be limited to the number of APIs shown. Some examples:

  • Hide/show blog posts, pages, etc. to certain users.
  • Hide/show specific menu item entries.
  • Even in the Discussion form, there might be categories invisible to some users

Joomla provides a powerable Access-Control-System, which we couldn’t use in the past, but with API-Portal 7.7 it became possible OOTB.

The following video showcases how to hide a menu-item entry:

Discover tips for choosing the right API Portal.

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