API Visibility

When a particular user creates an API in the API Publisher, s/he can set its visibility to either Public or Restricted by Roles in the Add New API page of the API Publisher Web interface as follows:

This allows you to prevent certain user roles from viewing and modifying APIs created by another user role. The two visibility values mean the following:

• Public : The API is visible to all users (subscribers and anonymous users) of its tenant store. Also, the API can be advertised in multiple stores - a central store and/or non-WSO2 stores.

• Restricted by Roles : The API is visible only to specific user roles in the tenant store. When Restricted by Roles is selected, a new field called Visible to Roles appears where you can specify the user roles that have access to the API in a comma-separated list (no spaces).

  • Roles that have API creation and publication permission can see all APIs in their tenant store even if you restrict access to those roles. This is because any role that has API creation and publication permission can view and edit all APIs in the API Publisher. Therefore, there is no reason to hide the APIs from them in the Store.
     
  • If you restrict the default subscriber role under the Visible to Roles category, any user who self subscribes to the API Store will be able to access the API. This is because the API Manager assigns the subscriber role to all users who sign up to the API Store.

Given below is how visibility levels work for users in different tenant modes:

Visibility in super tenant mode

Subscribers in super tenant mode can see an API depending on its visibility level as follows:

• Anonymous users : can see APIs with Public visibility
  
• Signed-up users : can see all APIs with Public visibility as well as APIs that are Restricted by Roles, give that the user is assigned to the role the API is restricted by.

Visibility in multi-tenant mode

In multi tenant environment, a subscriber can see API Store URLs of existing tenants. Click a URL to browse the tenant's API Store.

A tenant's API Store is the API Store specific to the tenant domain the user belongs to. You can also access it with the URL http://<hostname>/Store?tenant=<tenantdomain.com>. Therefore, the APIs a subscriber sees in multi tenant mode depend on their visibility levels as well as which API Store s/he is looking at. Any subscriber viewing his/her tenant's API Store can see an API depending on its visibility level as follows:

• Anonymous users: can see APIs that have Public visibility and created within the current user's tenant domain  
  
• Logged in users: can see,
  
  • APIs that have Public visibility and created within the current users tenant domain
    
  • Restricted by Roles APIs created within the current user's tenant domain and are allowed to be accessed by the role of the current user

Go back to Creating an API page.