Publishing a draft Product

Publish a draft Product to make the APIs in that Product visible on the Developer Portal for use by application developers. The syndication feature in IBM® API Connect means that if Spaces are enabled for a Catalog, Products can be published only to a Space within that Catalog.

Before you begin

Ensure that you have a Catalog to stage to in the API Manager or API Designer user interfaces (UI). For more information, see Creating and configuring Catalogs.

Note: All references in this topic to a Catalog can also be applied to Spaces in a Catalog, unless specified otherwise. For more information about Spaces, see Using syndication in IBM API Connect®.

To complete the Product management tasks that are described in this topic, you must either be the owner of the API provider organization, or be assigned Product > Manage permission for the target Catalog or Space. For information on configuring Product management permissions for a Catalog or Space, see Creating and configuring Catalogs or Managing user access in a Space.

About this task

You can complete this task either by using the API Designer UI application, or by using the browser based API Manager UI. Publishing is not available when working offline in API Designer.

You cannot re-publish a Product version to a production Catalog, you must create a new version of the Product for publication; see Creating a new version of your Product. If Spaces are enabled in a production Catalog, you cannot re-publish the same Product version to any Space in the Catalog, neither the same Space nor a different Space.

You can, however, re-publish a Product version to the Sandbox Catalog, or other non-production Catalog, for ease of iterative testing. When you re-publish a Product version to a non-production Catalog, you can choose whether or not to preserve any application subscriptions; deleting subscriptions can facilitate scripted deployment in a continuous integration environment, where the re-creation of application subscriptions will be controlled by the scripts.

If Spaces are enabled in a non-production Catalog and you re-publish a Product version to a different Space to the one in which it was previously published, it is removed from the previous Space and published to the newly specified Space.

Validation of the API OpenAPI definition file occurs during the staging or publishing process. The following validation occurs:

Validation against the OpenAPI schema by using the API Dev Tools Swagger-Parser (https://www.npmjs.com/package/@apidevtools/swagger-parser).
Validation against IBM extension properties
Semantic validation, which includes the following types of validation:
- Ensuring that if an API is enforced by an API Connect Gateway, then the scheme must be HTTPS, or the parameter name for an API key security scheme in the header must be either X-IBM-Client-Id or X-IBM-Client-Secret.
- Ensuring that if the API is not enforced by an API Connect Gateway, then a host must be provided
De-referencing of local references in the definition file (that is, values of $ref properties), and ensuring these are valid JSON Pointers within the file.

Note: If the OpenAPI file that defines your API uses a $ref field to reference a fragment of OpenAPI code that is defined in a separate file, the $ref field is replaced with the contents of the target file before the product that contains the API is staged or published (the $ref field is supported only if you are using the API Connect for IBM Cloud developer toolkit). For more information, see Using $ref to reuse code fragments in your OpenAPI files.

Procedure

To publish a Product, complete the following steps:

Optional: If you have accounts on multiple provider organizations, you can select a new provider organization for staging and publishing from the Organization menu.
In the navigation pane, click Develop.
Select the Products tab.
You can publish a Product either from the Develop listing page, or from within the Product itself.
1. To publish a Product from the Develop listing page, click the options menu icon alongside the required Product version, and then select Publish.
  If you are re-publishing a Product to non-production Catalog, and the Product has application subscriptions, the Publish option deletes them. To preserve application subscriptions, click Publish (Preserve Subscriptions) instead.
  Note: If there are any existing subscriptions to the Product, the Publish (Preserve Subscriptions) operation will fail if you remove any consumer organizations or consumer organization groups from the Product visibility or subscribability settings; you can, however, add further organizations or groups.
  For information on managing visibility and subscribability settings, see Editing a draft Product.
  
  For information on consumer organization groups, see Working with consumer organization groups.
2. To publish a Product from within the Product itself, complete the following steps:
  1. Click the Product version that you want to work with.
  2. Click the options menu icon:
  3. Select Publish.
Select the Catalog to which you want to publish the Product.
If Spaces have been enabled in the selected Catalog, select the Space that you require.

Note: The Catalogs that you can select from are those that are defined for the management server and provider organization that you are connected to.
If you are using the API Manager user interface, the connection details are determined by the API Manager URL that you open, and the user ID with which you log in. If you are using the API Designer user interface, you provide the management server details and user ID in the login window that opens when you first launch API Designer; see Logging into API Connect Designer.

For details of how to create a Catalog in a provider organization, see Creating and configuring Catalogs.
If you want to publish the Product only to selected gateway services, select Publish to specific gateway services, then select the required gateway services. Only the gateway services whose type matches the gateway type setting for the Product are listed. For information on gateway types, see API Connect gateway types.
The Visibility and Subscribability sections display the visibility and subscribability settings that have been configured for the draft Product, but you can modify these before publishing if required; proceed as follows:
1. In the Visibility section, specify the users that you want the Product to be visible to. You can choose Public to make the Product visible to all users, Authenticated to make the Product available to users who have successfully authenticated, or Custom to specify the consumer organizations and consumer organization groups that you want the Product to be visible to.
  If you select Custom, use the Type to add organizations field to search for the consumer organizations and consumer organization groups, in the selected Catalog, that you want the Product to be visible to. For information about how to create and manage consumer organizations and consumer organization groups, see Administering Consumer organizations.
2. In the Subscribability section, specify the users that can subscribe to the Plans in the Product. You can choose Authenticated to make the Plans in the Product subscribable by users who have successfully authenticated, or Custom to specify the consumer organizations and consumer organization groups that can subscribe to the Plans in the Product.
  If you select Custom, use the Search organizations and groups field to search for the consumer organizations and consumer organization groups, in the selected Catalog, that you want the Product to be subscribable to. If you selected custom visibility, only the consumer organizations and consumer organization groups selected there are available for adding to the custom subscribability list. For information about how to create and manage consumer organizations and consumer organization groups, see Administering Consumer organizations.
  Important: If you modify the visibility and subscribability settings here, the original settings in the draft Product are overwritten with these new settings, and any custom visibility and subscribability settings in the draft Product for Catalogs other than the one you are publishing the Product to are removed.
  Note:
  - If you select custom visibility or subscribability, only 10 search results are displayed in the selection list for the consumer organizations and consumer organization groups. If necessary, enter a more specific search string to refine the search.
  - If custom visibility or subscribability has already been configured in the draft Product, the titles that are displayed in the table of selected organizations and groups are derived by taking the names that are defined in the draft Product and finding the corresponding titles in the Catalog that has been selected as the publish target.
Click Publish.

Results

Your Product is published to a Catalog. The state of the Product is shown as Published in the header of the Product itself, and you can click Published to see which Catalogs or Spaces the Product is published to.

You can also view the state of the Product in the Catalog in API Manager. If you published the product from API Designer, ensure you are logged into API Manager with the same user name and password that you used for API Designer. Click Manage icon in the API Manager UI navigation pane Manage in the API Manager UI, then select the required Catalog. The Product is shown with a state of Published.

For information about the lifecycle of a product, see The Product lifecycle.

If approval is required to publish Products in the Catalog, a publish approval request is sent, and the Product moves to the Pending state; the Product is published in the Catalog when the request is approved. If approval is not required, the Product is published immediately.

Note: If approval is required to stage Products to the Catalog, a stage approval request is sent. When the request is approved, the Product moves to the staged state and must be separately published in the Catalog. For information on publishing a staged Product in a Catalog, see Publishing a Product.

For information on configuring Product lifecycle approvals for a Catalog, see Creating and configuring Catalogs. For information on approving requests, see Approving Product lifecycle and subscription requests.

If the Product contains no Plans, a Plan called Default Plan is added automatically to the Product in the Catalog.