Working with Catalogs
Products must be staged to a Catalog and then published; application developers are able to access the APIs in a Product by being members of consumer organizations to which the Product is made available. In API Connect, you can create multiple Catalogs. Catalogs are useful for separating Products and APIs for testing before you make them available to consumer organizations. The syndication feature in API Connect means that you can also publish a Product to a Space in a Catalog.
A Catalog is a staging target, and behaves as a logical partition of the gateway and the Developer Portal. The URL for API calls and the Developer Portal are specific to a particular Catalog. In a typical configuration, an API provider organization uses a development Catalog for testing APIs under development and a production Catalog for hosting APIs that are ready for full use. A common approach is to have a development cloud with a development Catalog, a few test Catalogs and a production cloud that might have its own test Catalog.
You can use a Space to partition a Catalog so multiple teams can manage Products and APIs independently in a single Catalog. A Space is conceptually like a sub-catalog, except that Products and APIs in all Spaces in a given Catalog are published to the same developer portal. For more information about Spaces, see Using syndication in API Connect.
Every account in the Developer Portal,
including across different user registries for the same site, must have a unique email address,
including the site Admin account. For example, if you configure three different user registries for
a particular Developer Portal
site, the email address alice@acme.com can be used to log in to the site from
only one of the user registries. The default email address for the Admin account is the email
address of the Catalog owner. It is not possible to create a user account (and associated Consumer
organization) with the same email address as the Admin account (or that of the Catalog owner if
their email address is different). Any attempts to create an account with the same email address
results in the new account not functioning correctly, and returning the following error message when
trying to log in: A user already exists with this email address.
For more information on using the Developer Portal, see Developer Portal: Socialize your APIs.