Message Flow in the API Manager Gateway

The Gateway of an API Manager deployment is responsible for the main business functionality of serving API traffic. The following diagram illustrates the message flow in the Gateway at a very high level.

The handlers

The handlers are request and response interceptors. The list of API handlers in WSO2 API-M are as follows:

APIMgtLatencyStatsHandler
CORSRequestHandler
APIAuthenticationHandler
ThrottleHandler
APIMgtUsageHandler
APIMgtGoogleAnalyticsTrackingHandler
APIManagerExtensionHandler

Each handler performs a specific task as mentioned in the table below. Note that some handlers are functional both at the inflow and outflow of messages.

Handler	Inflow	Outflow
APIMgtLatencyStatsHandler	Publish request and response latencies, if analytics is enabled	Publish request and response latencies, if analytics is enabled
CORSRequestHandler	Set CORS Headers	Set CORS Headers
APIAuthenticationHandler	Request authentication	N/A
ThrottleHandler	Request throttling	N/A
APIMgtUsageHandler	Publish request data, if analytics is enabled	N/A
APIMgtGoogleAnalyticsTrackingHandler	Publish data to Google Analytics, if Google Analytics is configured	N/A
APIManagerExtensionHandler	Execute custom mediation sequences at inflow	Execute custom mediation sequences at outflow

Mediation extensions

Mediation extensions are the custom mediation logic that can be executed in either the inflow or the outflow. For more details on how to configure mediation extensions, see Adding Mediation Extensions.

In sequence and out sequence

The in sequence and out sequence carry the main business logic of the request flow. The in sequence handles sending the request from the client to the backend, while the out sequence routes the response sent from the backed to the client.