Publishing a new Product

Publish a Product from within its containing Catalog in API Manager. The syndication feature in IBM® API Connect means that you can also publish a Product from within its containing Space in a Catalog.

Before you begin

The Product that you are publishing must be in the Staged or Deprecated state.

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 Manage permission for products in the catalog that contains the product. If you have View permission for products, you have read-only access to the product management page. For information on configuring product management permissions for a catalog, see Creating and configuring catalogs.

The syndication feature in IBM API Connect means that products can be contained within a space in a catalog. In this case, 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 Manage permission for products in the space that contains the product. For information on configuring product management permissions for a space, see 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.

If you publish a Product to a non-development Catalog, the Product that is published is an independent and fixed copy of the version of the Product that you chose to stage. Editing the Product through the Products page will not affect the published Product. For this reason, it is recommended that when you stage a Product, you then create a new version of the Product to edit in future, so as to avoid confusion regarding the properties of the published Product. For more information on creating new versions of your Product, see Creating a new version of your Product.

An exception is that if you publish a Product to a development Catalog, editing it through the Products page will enable you to re-stage and publish the same version of the Product. For information on how to create a development Catalog, see Creating and configuring Catalogs.

Although you can publish to a development Catalog, the development Catalog should be used only for testing purposes. Similarly, a Developer Portal created from a development Catalog must be used for testing purposes only, and not for production use. For more information on Catalogs, see Working with Catalogs.

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

Procedure

To publish a Product, complete the following steps:

In the navigation pane of the API Manager UI, click Manage catalogs, then select the catalog that you want to work with.
The Products page of the catalog opens, and all of the products available in that catalog are displayed.
If the product that you want to work with is contained within a space, select the required space by completing the following steps:
1. Click the Spaces tab.
2. Select the space that you want to work with.
The Products page of the space opens, and all of the products available in that space are displayed.
Alongside the Product version that you want to work with, click the options icon and then click Publish.
The Confirm Visibility Settings page opens.
Specify the following options:
- The users that the Product is visible to
  
  You can choose Public users, Authenticated users, or Custom.
  - Custom - You can use the Type to add... field to search for organizations or communities that you want your Product to be visible to.
- Who can subscribe to the Product
  
  You can add or remove one or more consumer organizations or communities.
  - Custom - You can use the Type to add... field to search for organizations or communities that you want to allow to subscribe to your Product.
Click Publish, then click Confirm to proceed with the publish operation.
If approval is required to publish Products in this Catalog, an approval request is sent, and the Product moves to the Pending state; the Product is published when the request is approved. If approval is not required, the Product version is published immediately, and moves to the Published state. 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.
Note:
- Approval for product lifecycle state changes in a catalog is disabled by default. You must explicitly enable the product lifecycle state changes that you want to enforce.
- Product lifecycle approvals can be configured only at the Catalog level. This feature is not available at the Space level.
- To view the subscription tasks history, complete the following steps:
  
  In the navigation pane of the API Manager UI, click Manage, then select the catalog that you want to work with.
  
  Click Tasks tab.
  
  Click Approvals history from the navigation pane.
- You can view the history of Product lifecycle requests and approvals, by clicking the options icon alongside the Product that you want to work with, and selecting View Approval History.

Results

Your Product is in the Published state.

Your Product is published to your Catalog and available to your specified organizations or communities. Application developers within the groups you selected can see and use the APIs within the Product.

Any application developer requests to use your Product are displayed on the Approvals tab in the containing Catalog, where you can decline or accept the request.