Managing communities
Community facilitates API Administrators or API Providers in handling API visibility among the webMethods Developer Portal users.
Users with API Administrator and API Provider privileges can create communities and manage the members of a community.
- Private community
- As the name suggests, a private community contains APIs that are available only for its
members.
When you publish an API from API Gateway, providers can select specific communities to restrict the access of the 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. In such cases, you can group the users of each domain as a community and offer them the APIs.
As an administrator, you can restrict the visibility of consumer users within their communities. That is, when a consumer searches for other consumers to share an application or package subscription, or during team creation they can view only the consumer users who belong to their communities. For more information about this setting, see Configuring visibility of users based on communities.
- Public community
- The public community comes along with the product installation and is open to all users,
registered or nonregistered.
By default, the APIs published from API Gateway and the ones that are created in webMethods 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 by using the Edit option.
To restrict the access of assets, users must assign them to a private community.
Manage communities in webMethods 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 APIs that belong to a community by grouping the APIs by Communities in the API gallery page.