Overview
An API “subscription” allows you to access APIs within your own custom-developed applications. We require a unique subscription for each API your application calls. If you have multiple applications that require access to the same API, you will need a unique subscription for each application.
Each subscription provides your application unique credentials to access that API as well as a method to interact with the API (“Try-it” functionality) and usage metrics.
APIs are grouped together with related APIs in API Products. If you would like to use a specific API in your application, you will need a subscription to the corresponding API Product. This guide will walk you through the API Product subscription process. You may also find additional, specific instructions within API Developer Guide articles in the Knowledge Hub.
Exploring APIs
The API explorer is accessible from the API option on the main navigation bar at the top of the screen. The explorer allows you to search the catalog to learn about API Products, their functionality, specific endpoints, parameters, responses and sample code. It also provides a link to download the OpenAPI specification in yaml format. This file may be opened in a standard text-editor or in tools like Postman, Insomnia, Testfully and others. However, you will not be able to make test calls against the API until you have a valid subscription.
Upon selecting the API Products you plan to use in your applications, you may click on the “subscribe” button to request a new API subscription.
Subscribing to an API
API Subscriptions can be a requested for a developer team. Using teams, you can easily grant access to API Try-it functionality and usage metrics for multiple developers, without each individual developer needing to maintain their own individual subscription.
For a team subscription, the developer that submits the initial API subscription becomes the team admin by default. This developer can add and remove developers as well as additional admins for the team subscription.
To subscribe to an API, you will need to provide the following:
1. Team Details: This section of the form contains the information about the developer requesting the API subscription. Teams allow you to have multiple members (developers and administrators) and can be associated with multiple applications. (Depending on the size of your organization, a team can consist of one team member.)
- Create a new team?
- Selecting No, provides a list of existing teams created by you as well as additional teams for which you are a member (managed by another team admin).
- Selecting Yes, allows you to create a new team, team description and add developers if desired. You can always add/remove developers later from the “manage teams” option on your profile menu.
2. App Details: A name and description of the application that will be accessing the API. This information will help your team keep track of the APIs used by each application.
- Create a new App?
- The list of available apps is determined by the team selected above. You may select from this list or create a New App and description.
3. Client ID Details: Client IDs are unique keys used to associated API subscriptions to specific applications.
- Request new client ID or subscribe an existing ID?
- Select "Request a new client ID" unless otherwise instructed by your developer admin or product owner. Subscribing existing IDs is reserved for unique business cases.
4. Environment Details: This option is only displayed if multiple environments are available. The form will default to PROD for most read-only APIs. However, if you are signing up for a new subscription to read/write API, you should choose QA to use the sandbox data. Please check the API Subscription section of this API product's Developer Guide for additional details.
5. Application Business Case: Details on how your application will be using the API and what business case you are hoping to address. This information will help our developers continue to enhance our API Products to address new use cases.
6. Press "Submit": Upon validating your entries, pressing the submit button will send your request to the Cat Digital Support team to complete your subscription request. Subscription turnaround time is approximately 5-7 days. Additional validation and processing steps may occur through email based on the API Product subscription selected.
