SAP API Management: 5 new features to ease things up

Introduction:

As API owners, you might spend a considerable amount of time on the API Portal building your API. We constantly look for opportunities to make the journey easy for you and hence brought in new capabilities to the product in the recent months. In this blog, I summarize these latest additions.

Create a Copy of an API

When you build your first API, you will start from scratch, may be discover from an ODATA service catalog and handcraft all the documentation and policies. But in some cases, your second and all the subsequent APIs may be similar to your first API in many ways. So, it would be very helpful to create a copy of your existing API and then apply the required modification to save development effort and minimize errors. API Portal now gives you option to Copy an existing API as shown in the screen shots below.

You need to enter a unique name and API Base path to go ahead with the copy. Once copied, a new API is created which you can freely edit and deploy.

Local Proxy Targets

Let’s say you have already built an API Proxy (A) that offers some low-level functionality like CRUD operations to a backend store. If you need a similar function to be invoked from a different API Proxy (B) that is exposing data from the store, you could use A as a target endpoint in B via a local connection. This can be programmed by choosing A right from your Create Dialog as shown below.

Such local API Proxy targets are accessed without leaving the network; thus, minimizing the network overhead. Hence, they are much efficient in terms of end to end response time while still allowing you to build modular APIs.

API Provider Test Connection

It is very common that you will have API Proxies created for services discovered through an API Provider. Now, there could be cases where the configuration (system details) on this API Provider has changed which is resulting in API Proxy errors. To identify such cases quickly we have introduced a Test Connection action on every API Provider which when clicked will check if the system is reachable with the saved configurations. In case it returns an error, you know there is something wrong which needs your attention.

In the above example, I had to adjust my credentials to get a successful ping.

Bookmarkable entity URLs

When you are working on a particular entity in the API Portal like an API or a Product, you may want to bookmark its URL to quickly visit it in future. It is now possible to do so for APIs, Products, Applications, API Providers, Certificates, Policy Templates and Rate plans. Every entity gets a unique URL that you can save for future and accessing the URL will directly take you to the desired entity.

Recent APIs on Home Page

The Home page acts as a summary page to get a glimpse of what is happening in the API Portal. Along with seeing the statistics on the performance of the APIs, you will now get to see the list of recently modified APIs. If you are one of the API developers, you can use this to quickly reach to your work-in-progress API from the Home page. If you are one of the administrators, you can use this to monitor which APIs are being worked upon by whom right from the Home page.

Summary

Apart from the above features, you will also observe that the detailed views for all API Portal entities are now revamped with a new layout. Information has been reorganized for better readability. We hope that these new additions bring value to you. In case of any feedback or questions, please leave a comment.