Exploring APIs and Products in the Developer Portal
As an application developer, you can browse, test, and subscribe to APIs in the Developer Portal by exploring the available API Products.
- Browsing available APIs
- In API Connect API
providers package their APIs into Products to offer one or more APIs to application developers. The
providers then use Plans to control access to APIs and to manage API usage. Products are packages
that contain both the APIs and the accompanying Plans.From the Developer Portal home screen, click API Products to browse the available products. You can then select a Product to explore the available Plans and APIs further, including viewing API code snippets, and request and response examples.Note: If you have an account on the Developer Portal, you can specify a default programming language for the code snippets to display in by editing the Code Snippet Language in your account settings.
- Subscribing to a Plan
- A Plan is a collection of API operations or subsets of operations from one or more APIs. In
order to subscribe to a Plan, you must have an account on the Developer Portal and
have created an App. For more information, see User accounts, passwords, and support in the Developer Portal and Applications in the Developer Portal.
Rate limits specify how many requests an App is allowed to make during a specified time interval. A Plan can have a shared rate limit for all the operations, or each operation can have a different rate limit. In addition, Plans can have multiple rate limits set per Plan and per operation, at second, minute, hour, day, and week time intervals. Plans can also have burst limits to prevent usage spikes that might damage infrastructure. Multiple burst limits can be set per Plan, at second and minute time intervals.
After you have identified the Plan that you want to use, click Subscribe and then select the App that you want to use with this Plan. If the Plan is not restricted, you can use it immediately. If the Plan is restricted, the subscription is shown as Pending Approval, and you cannot use the requested Plan until the administrator approves your request.
You cannot subscribe to a monetized Plan without first adding your payment information to your Consumer organization. You can register your payment information by editing the Billing tab for your Consumer organization. Note: you must either be the Consumer organization owner, or have Settings: Manage permissions for your organization to be able to edit the billing information. Consumer organizations can have at most one payment method. You can delete your payment method and add a different method, for example if your credit card expires. If you change your subscription to a Plan that has a different pricing structure, the subscription billing system will add a prorated amount to the next invoice of your subscription billing cycle.
- Testing an API
- You can test an API in the Developer Portal by using the interactive API document test tool. If the API operation that you want to test doesn't require a client ID, then you can use the test tool without the need to log in. For more information, see Testing an API by using the Developer Portal test tool.
- Calling an API in your application
- When you have subscribed to a Plan and you begin coding your application, you must retrieve the operation URL in order to call the API. You can retrieve the operation URL from the API overview page. For more information, see Calling an API.