Introduction to API operations

This page applies to Apigee and Apigee hybrid.

API operations represent the fundamental actions performed on an API. These are the specific verbs, or functions, that define an API's capabilities. By exposing operations as individual entities, API hub facilitates granular search and discovery helping developers to quickly identify APIs that offer the required functionality. API operations can be automatically extracted from API specifications or manually created from the API details page or using the Operations API.

Automatically extracted operations

API hub automatically extracts any API operations defined in the OpenAPI specification file during specification ingestion. This process provides an initial population of operations based on the API's design. To manually add, update, or remove operations, or to overwrite the automatically extracted operations, use the operations API.

Manually created operations

You can manually create and manage API operations for your API versions either from the API details page or using the Operations API in API hub. This lets you supplement or override the automatically extracted operations, providing more flexibility and control over the API's representation in API hub.

For more information, see Manage API operations.

How API operations used in API hub?

API operations are used in the following ways in API hub:

  • Semantic Search: API operations are used in Semantic Search to find APIs that offer the required functionality.
  • API exploration: By exposing operations as individual entities, API hub facilitates granular search and discovery helping developers to quickly identify APIs.
  • Dependency analysis: API operations are used to analyze the dependencies between APIs. This can be viewed in API hub's Supply chain page. For example, you can identify which APIs are calling a specific operation and which are being called by a specific operation.

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