Authoring policies

With the on-premise offering, you can control specific processing features in the Gateway server of IBM® API Connect by creating user-defined policies.

IBM API Connect enables organizations to easily promote business services as APIs to internal and external developer communities. API developers can rapidly create, proxy, assemble, and secure APIs through the API Designer user interface (UI). The API Designer assembly feature allows API developers to create complex REST or SOAP API operations that transform data, perform multiple service calls, aggregate data, and apply policies.

A policy is a piece of configuration that controls a specific aspect of processing in the IBM DataPower® Gateway server during the handling of an API invocation at run time. IBM API Connect provides a number of different types of policies, but you can also create user-defined policies to provide more processing control.

When would you need a user-defined policy?

A user-defined policy enables you to control extra processing features in the Gateway server, such as security, or routing of requests. The user-defined policies feature is available only with the on-premise offering of IBM API Connect.

Create a user-defined policy in IBM API Connect when you need to augment the actions or activities that are performed by the API gateway. For example, you might want to perform the following operations:
  • Implement your own proprietary logic for dynamic routing of requests.
  • Enforce extra security constraints to your API.
  • Make accessible an extra capability that is provided in DataPower that is not yet accessible in the IBM API Connect policy catalog.
Note: For best results, do not try to update your existing user-defined policies, because those are already in use by your APIs. Instead, create a new version of the policy that you want to update, and then modify the API assembly to use the newer version of the policy.

See the following topics for more information about user-defined policies, and how to create and import them into IBM API Connect: