Book Image

Digital Transformation and Modernization with IBM API Connect

By : Bryon Kataoka, James Brennan, Ashish Aggarwal
Book Image

Digital Transformation and Modernization with IBM API Connect

By: Bryon Kataoka, James Brennan, Ashish Aggarwal

Overview of this book

IBM API Connect enables organizations to drive digital innovation using its scalable and robust API management capabilities across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. With API Connect's security, flexibility, and high performance, you'll be able to meet the needs of your enterprise and clients by extending your API footprint. This book provides a complete roadmap to create, manage, govern, and publish your APIs. You'll start by learning about API Connect components, such as API managers, developer portals, gateways, and analytics subsystems, as well as the management capabilities provided by CLI commands. You’ll then develop APIs using OpenAPI and discover how you can enhance them with logic policies. The book shows you how to modernize SOAP and FHIR REST services as secure APIs with authentication, OAuth2/OpenID, and JWT, and demonstrates how API Connect provides safeguards for GraphQL APIs as well as published APIs that are easy to discover and well documented. As you advance, the book guides you in generating unit tests that supplement DevOps pipelines using Git and Jenkins for improved agility, and concludes with best practices for implementing API governance and customizing API Connect components. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to transform your business by speeding up the time-to-market of your products and increase the ROI for your enterprise.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Digital Transformation and API Connect
5
Section 2: Agility in Development
15
Section 3: DevOps Pipelines and What's Next

Using a Map policy

The Map policy is perhaps one of the most user-friendly methods provided to transform request and response data. This policy provides a way to define your data structure or invoke the schema from your Definitions configuration within the API configuration itself. Once the to and from data definitions are defined, this policy provides a convenient drag and drop feature to simply connect the fields to be mapped. The Map policy also provides the ability to add conditional logic, data formatting, calculations, and more. Although this policy can provide all of these features, you should use some restraint when being tempted to get too complex with it as the simplicity may come at a cost. That cost could be the performance or your API.

To explain and demonstrate how to configure the Map policy, let's take a simple order service where we are exposing the API as a RESTful service that expects JSON as the request. The backend, or target service, however, has not...