webMethods Developer Portal was created based on our many conversations with our customers and their requirements around creating API marketplaces. One of these requirements was to enable flexible and extensible options to add new users from within their organization or partner organizations, or external users. Organizations want to have complete control over who signs up for their portal, and want to make user onboarding as easy or as complex as it makes sense for them.
With those requirements in mind, we created the multi-step approval workflow that can be a combination of internal approvals, external approvals, and email verifications in the Developer Portal. If you want to learn more about setting up user onboarding in the Developer Portal, read on…
User onboarding setup
Onboarding strategy is managed in the Administration menu as given in the screenshot below. The User onboarding menu lists the three options that can be turned on for approvals.
Internal approval (1) is for approving users in the Developer Portal. Different Developer Portal users or groups can be assigned as approvers. When the internal approval strategy is turned on, the Value (4) for the strategy that will be followed needs to be specified. These strategies are created in the Approval workflow tab in Administration menu as described in the next section.
External approval (2) is for creating an approval workflow outside of the Developer Portal. When this strategy is turned on, the Developer Portal expects the Approval REST API to be called to process the external approval. A practical application of this would be integrating with a project tracking software such as Jira. A webhook can be configured to send out notifications to this system when an external approval is needed. When this notification is received, the admin in that system can approve or reject this request and an integration flow could connect the approval/rejection action to the REST API.
Email verification (3) is for the onboarding user to receive an email to confirm their email address.
These approval strategies can be turned on or off, and their order can be arranged with the buttons to their right (5). You can even specify a default community for onboarding users (6) in order to have control over which APIs they can see when they are approved.
When the user onboarding strategy is saved, each user who signs up to your portal will go through this approval flow.
Application or subscription onboarding can be set up similarly.
Approval workflow setup
Approval workflows are created in the Administration menu as seen in the screenshot below. The first step is to specify a name and a description (A). The approver can be specified as a group or a user (B), and approval mode (C) can be specified as anyone in the group to be able to approve or requiring everyone in the group to approve. Multiple groups/users can be added to create a multi-step internal approval flow and their order can be arranged (D). When saved, you can use this approval workflow for internal approvals.
Onboarding made easy (or difficult if you need so)
The flexible onboarding strategies enabled by the Developer Portal gives your organization the control over who can access to your APIs. With these features, you can make onboarding as easy or as difficult as your API program requires.