Communities

Overview

Community facilitates API Administrators or API Providers in handling API visibility among the Developer Portal users.

Users with API Administrator and API Provider privileges can create communities and manage the members of a community.

There are two types of communities in Developer Portal - private community and public community.

Private community

As the name suggests, a private community contains APIs that are available only for its members.

When publishing an API from API Gateway, providers can select specific communities to restrict the access of asset by other users.

Users can access only the assets that are assigned to their communities. For example, consider your portal provides APIs to the users of multiple domains such as Banking, Healthcare, Telecom, and so on. In such cases, you can group the users of each domain as a community and offer them the required APIs.

Similarly, consumer users can view only the consumers from their communities. That is, when you, as a consumer user, search for consumers to share an application or package subscription, or during team creation you can view only the consumer users who are a part of your communities.

Public community

The public community comes along with the product installation and is open to all users, registered or non-registered.

By default, the APIs published from API Gateway and the ones created in Developer Portal are posted as a part of the public community. If an API that is not a part of the public community, you can add the APIs to the public community using the Edit option.

To restrict the access of assets, users must assign them to a private community.

Manage communities in Developer Portal

The Manage communities section allows you to group the users who work in a project or users with similar roles as a community to assign APIs only for the access of that community. This feature is helpful for providers that offer APIs to a wide range of customers from various disciplines.

API Administrators have the privileges to assign community administrators, add users to, and remove users from a community. APIs are assigned to specific communities by API Providers, and the packages are published to communities from API Gateway. API consumers have access to APIs and packages depending on whether they belong to a specific community or not. Consumers can view the API(s) that belong to a community by grouping the APIs by Communities in the API gallery page.

How do I create a community?

You can create any number of communities.

This use case begins when you want to create a community and ends when you have created one.

In this example, a private community Mobile_app_developer is created with users consumeruser10, consumeruser11, and consumeruser12 as members, the user administratoruser1 as community administrator, the user group API Consumer, and the API Number_APIKey.

Before you begin:

Ensure that you have the API Administrator privilege.

To create a community

1. Click the menu options icon from the title bar and click Manage communities.

2. Click Create community.

3. Provide Mobile_app_developer in the Name field.

4. Select consumeruser10, consumeruser11, and consumeruser12 from the Users field.

5. Select administratoruser1 from the Administrators field.

6. Select API Consumer from the Groups field.

7. Select Number_APIKey from the APIs field.

   

8. Click Save.

   The Mobile_app_developer community is created.

Alternative steps:

• Modify the list of the mapped users and APIs using the Edit communities option.
  

Next steps:

• Select a community in the API gallery page to view the APIs of that community.

  

How do I map the required user, group, or API to a community?

You can edit the community to map the required users, user groups, and APIs to the community.

This use case begins when you want to edit any existing communities and ends when you have saved the changes.

In this example, consider the community Mobile_app_developers that has one administrator administratoruser1 must be mapped to one more administrator, administratoruser2.

To map users, user groups, or APIs to a community

1. Click the menu options icon from the title bar and click Manage communities.

2. Click the edit icon next to Mobile_app_developers.

3. Select administratoruser2 in the Groups field.

4. Click the add icon .

   

5. Click Save.

   Your changes are saved. The API providers user group is mapped to the Mobile_app_developers community.

Alternative steps:

• Modify the list of the mapped users and APIs from the corresponding fields.