Name: API Part 1: Creating Reusable Services with Celigo’s API Builder
Uploaded: 2025-09-09T16:18:08.757Z
Duration: 46 min 32 s
Description: API Part 1: Creating Reusable Services with Celigo’s API Builder

Transcript for "API Part 1: Creating Reusable Services with Celigo’s API Builder": Alright. Well, first of all, it is cool to see in the chat, where everyone is dialing in from. I'm seeing everything from The Philippines, Sri Lanka, Indiana to New York. So it's just cool to see the reach of Celigo, and and thank you all for tuning in and joining today. Today, the topic's going to be about creating reusable services with our API builder, which is essentially our new, a new feature that's been pretty widely adapt adopted that takes the same builder paradigm that you know and love for building integrations and allows you to build and expose APIs. Before we get into the meat of the presentation today, I just wanted to do a quick plug that we are running a promo where if you join us for a demo all throughout the month of September, we will be giving you a a $50 gift card. This is only, open to, new Celigo customers, so prospects. Okay. So first, we're going to go through just some general thoughts on the IT landscape, our platform, and how we feel that it addresses some of those challenges. A bit more on API examples, what constitutes an API use case, what are some of the challenges associated with building and managing APIs. And then we'll go into the demo portion, which will be done by Kosta on our product team. We will go over a use case of building an API that exposes pricing and inventory data, and then also a customer three sixty API that gathers information about individual customers across all of their digital touch points. Cool. So Celigo ultimately transforms how integrations are built and who manages them. So historically, integrations have been built and managed completely by IT, and that's largely because they're hamstrung by the methodology or the platform that they're using to implement integrations. Right? So a lot of these older, more legacy platforms or coding approaches make it so only IT can deliver integrations, and it leads to a really long project backlog. With Celigo, we've kind of democratized the building of integrations, with our low code intuitive easy to use builder. We've unlocked capabilities at the line of business level. So a lot of businesses users can really build the processes that they're closest to while IT can have the right governance and guardrails in place. And this is done through a number of features within our platform, but notably, prebuilt capabilities like connectors and templates through our marketplace, AI code assistance that eliminate roadblocks and make it easier for you to build, and then really easy maintenance when you think about your IT or your operations team that constantly has to triage errors. We have capabilities like AI error management that auto resolves 95% of errors before they even reach your team. And while we grew up in the application integration space, we now support multiple integration patterns. So instead of having point to point tools for EDI or API management or API building, you're able to consolidate all of this functionality into one platform. You're training your teams on one skill set and you're decreasing your total cost of ownership. So here are some of the areas we've expanded into, like I mentioned, not just app integration, but also b two b manager that supports EDI use cases, API management, DI, and then AI agents as well. Today, we'll be talking about API builder, which you see right here within our builder workspace. But first, before we get into API builder, I really wanna talk about what an API use case is versus an integration use case because I know that there's a little bit of complexity here. So in integration, we're talking about automating different processes within our tech stack. So this is system to system data transfer. You're not exposing this externally to different lines of business or outside of your organization. So it could be something like, hey. I wanna automate my lead life cycle management process. So when a lead meets this criteria, they're routed, to this this system. Or I wanna make sure that my employees can be onboarded efficiently. So if the w two employee, we'll provision them these applications. If it's a ten ninety nine, we'll provision them these. So it's triggered by a specific event or schedule. It could be by a a web hook in one system or it could be, you know, on a certain polling interval, whether it's a minute, an hour, or a day. API use cases are a bit different. So you're basically taking a service that you're building and you're exposing that service to other lines of business or external parties, and they can invoke that, that API and get access to that data in real time. So it's synchronous. Think about a manufacturing partner who needs information on pricing and SKU, data that resides in your back end system. You would expose an API where they only have access to the information they need. They would call on that API, and then they would retrieve the data back, all pretty much instantaneously real time. So external systems, whether it's partners, whether it's portals, can call the API and get access to the data in real time as opposed to an integration use case where you're just automating your back end systems or applications. Here are a few examples that we can go through. So if you follow one of these buckets, you likely, should talk with our team, and we can start to think about your API strategy and how you could go about building this into Celigo because these are all core API use cases. So one, I need to expose a custom API for customers to retrieve their order history, invoice data, or real time shipment tracking from NetSuite. I need to expose pricing, inventory, or product catalogs to distributors or retail partners via API. My picking system needs to get real time inventory information for my ERP to ensure that a full order can be shipped. So now let's talk about some of the challenges here with building, developing, and managing APIs. So first, it's difficult to expose data and services from, back end systems in general. You have to, deal with a lot of different interfaces, a lot of different data structures, be able to transform that data into a usable format where it can easily be consumed by developers or whoever your external consumer is. There's also a lack of built in security and access control. So you wanna make sure that when you're exposing APIs, they have things like rate limiting in place to protect your back end systems. Those are built in, to APIs. So you need to be really careful about making sure that your APIs are secure, especially when you're exposing critical information and back end data. And then there's slow and costly custom API development cycles. So APIs are all built with different standards. They could be built custom. No one knows what's going on under the hood, and it becomes a long and arduous process that leads to missed timelines and project deliverables. So here's our solution basically to address that, and it's called API builder. So when you're looking through this slide, you should see that this interface looks very similar to our flow builder, which you use to build integrations. And that was by design. If you wanted to extend the same builder paradigm that you know and love from building integrations and make it as easy as possible for your team to ramp up on building APIs. In that way, you're one skill set as opposed to two, three, or four, you're able to pick up wherever you left off and be really efficient and accelerate your speed to market. A few of the features to call out. So you have a request node and a response node at the end. So you're using the request node to set up things like the query parameters or what's needed to execute on the API call, and then you're, doing different imports and, lookups along the way. Basically, where is the data coming from, what format is it coming in, and then you're mapping that all to the API response node at the end. Right after you create an API, you can quickly download the OAS spec, and it can be pushed right into the API management console where it could be secured, socialized, and monitored. So when we think about the whole API life cycle, build, secure, socialize, monitor, we're able to do all of that in one platform, which is really unique about Celigo. And we'll be touching on two important use cases during the demo. So you'll get a real feel for what the interface looks like, how to use it, how can I start to build within API builder? And here's just a quick map of sort of the the art of the possible. So when you think about it, you have your core back end systems, so different apps, databases, maybe AI services, and you're exposing that data. That's really the foundational system data. And then on top of that, you can build out different processes. So those are more composite services. So maybe you've exposed information from your CRM, but then to create a customer three sixty view, you also wanna tie together information from other marketing systems, and you wanna orchestrate that data in such a way that it creates a customer three sixty. Now you're talking about your business API. So you're creating a positive services that reflect real business logic and use use cases. And from there, you can expose that, those processes and that system level data to different applications, portals, customers. It's really data as a service at that point. And when you think about the next initiative, you might be able to build on top of a API that's already been created versus starting completely from scratch. And that's a lot of the value of modern API led integration is that reuse component. So without further ado, we are going to step into the demo portion and share two use cases with you. One will be, sharing ERP information, so that's inventory pricing, and then we will get into a building a customer three sixty API. And we will leave time at the end for questions. So if you have any, either save it for the end or feel free to add it to the chat during the demo, and we will get to it at the end. In this video, we'll walk through the first phase of API management, the build phase. Let's say you're an API developer at Acme Chocolatiers, and you want to build a new API and expose it to your external partners and customers to fetch inventory and pricing information for an item from multiple internal systems, say inventory count from Microsoft Business Central, and pricing from Shopify. You can do all of this efficiently in Celigo. From the Celigo homepage, you can click here to start creating the API by adding a name and version. This will take you to the API builder campus. Let's open the API request node where you can configure the HTTP method, relative URI, and other request parameters such as the path and query parameters. Similarly, you can configure the HTTP response code and body in the API response node for both success and error. Next, you'll want to ensure that the API request parameters required in your business logic are added in the transformation step. First, let's edit the mock API request with some test data. Preview the changes. And then, here in the transformation step, add the required path and query parameters. Let's add a lookup step to fetch the inventory information from Business Central. You can either create a new step from scratch or select a prebuilt step. Configure the connection. View the mock input to this step. Update the path and query parameters for this API endpoint, and preview the data. Let's add the results mapping to pull in a few fields from the lookup, like the item name and inventory count, which you'll need to generate the API response. And the Shopify ID, which you'll use in a downstream step. You can add an input filter here to validate the incoming item ID. You can also add branching to fetch inventory details from another system, like NetSuite, based on a request parameter. Next, we'll add another lookup step to fetch pricing information from Shopify using the ID we mapped earlier. Save your changes and map the pricing data here in the results mapping. Last, you'll want to use the response node mapping to map the source record fields to your final API response fields. Now that the API is built, you can test it using the mock API request. Click the test API button, and it works. Ultimately, if you're building APIs, you want your app developers, whether they're partners, customers, or internal users, to consume them and power new or existing business apps. So let's use Postman to test this API in action. Copy the endpoint. Use your Celigo API token for authentication. And send a test request. You'll see a 200 okay response, and the payload looks great. TELIGO's API builder automatically logs every API invocation. No manual setup needed. You get visibility into headers, payloads, and even error logs all out of the box. The API engine is optimized for high throughput and low latency, and there's no need to worry about traffic spikes. Celigo back end scales automatically. Now exposing back end APIs like this to external consumers securely and at scale, is tough without the right tools. That's where Celigo API management comes in. Click push to a PIM to start. Add a context path, HTTP method, and endpoint path. Celigo automatically generates the open API specification and sends it to the API management console. Click push. Give it a second or two and voila. Your API now appears in the API management console. From there, you can view and edit the API name, version, and description. Choose a category and start the API. View the gateway URL, back end service URL, and the endpoint in the policy studio. See default policies like override HTTP method and transform header. Check the plan section to manage access limits and API subscriptions. In documentation, you'll find the auto generated open API spec, which is perfect for your app developers. Finally, let's switch to debug mode and verify that the API request is proxied to the back end successfully. And as expected, the response comes through just fine. For just a few clicks, you've seen how to go from building a back end API to securely exposing it as a fully managed API, laying the foundation for scalable, secure, and developer friendly API management in Celigo. Well, I hope you liked that demo, and we will also be going through now a customer three sixty use case. So, Kossat, if you could bring that up right now. Goal here is just to show you the breadth of different APIs that you can build within API builder and really what's possible, when it comes to building services or building APIs rapidly on Soligo's platform. In this video, we'll build a customer three sixty API using Celigo's API builder. Let's say you're an API developer at Acme Chocolatiers where customer information is siloed across various systems, such as Salesforce and Snowflake. You need to build a new API that allows internal users to retrieve data about a specific customer in order to provide a holistic, unified view of that customer. Using Celigo low code API builder, you can achieve this quickly and easily without writing complex code. To start, create an API by adding a name and version. In the API builder canvas, open the API request node where you can configure the HTTP method and relative URI. Add a query parameter called customer name to enable your consumers to query details for that specific customer. Next, open the API response node for success, configure the response code, and the response body schema. You can upload a JSON to generate the schema or add the fields manually. Similarly, configure the response code for the error node. Now you will want to ensure that the query parameter required in your business logic is added in the transformation step. First, let's edit the mock API request with some test data, preview the changes, and then here in the transformation step, add the required query parameters. To pull customer data from Salesforce, add a lookup step. You can use a prebuilt step or create one from scratch. Configure the connection. Write a sock l query to fetch fields like phone number and industry. And preview the data. Then map the results to your source record. Repeat this process for Snowflake. Add another lookup step. Configure the connection, write the SQL query, Preview the results. And map relevant customer data. Last, you'll want to use the response node mapping to map the source record fields to your final API response fields. Now that the API is built, you can test it using the mock API request. Click the test API button, and it works. Let's see how internal users can consume this API using a tool like Postman. Copy the endpoint. Use Celigo's API token for authentication. Add the customer name query parameter. And send a test request. You'll get a 200 response with the expected payload. You can add input validation either in the input filter or transformation step to check if the query parameter is present. If it's missing, return a custom error. Now when the parameter is omitted, the API returns an appropriate error message. With just a few clicks, you've built a powerful customer three sixty API using Celigo low code API builder. So I hope that everyone enjoyed, those two use cases. I think that they highlight, a lot of the different pieces of functionality that come along with API builder from being able to, quickly orchestrate and transform data, to testing, to debugging, all the way through, moving that to API management where it is secured, socialized, and monitored. It's a pretty seamless end to end experience. So when we think about some of the benefits, we're talking about increased productivity. So instead of having to build this custom or maybe with another more legacy tool, as you can see in the video, you can build these services and these APIs very rapidly, which is gonna decrease your overall time to build and increase, your speed. You're reducing your total cost of ownership because when you think about straining together all these different tools, now you have app to app integration, API building, API management, and even other integration patterns like EDI all under one roof. And, hopefully, this gets you to a point which we'll get to in the next slide where you're taking a modern API led approach to exposing data to internal parties and everyone else outside of your ecosystem. So I know we touched on, this this screen before, but just thinking about reuse here, where if you built an inventory and pricing API or receipt status API or an invoice status API, you can now reuse that. Maybe you use it for internal website, and now you have to expose that same information to a customer portal. You're no longer starting from scratch. You can reuse and build on top of those APIs and just create new experiences on top versus having to redo or rewrite your whole architecture. And you can see what that looks like with the gateway in place. So here, when we look at the feature coverage in the bottom left, we have our build phase completely covered. But when it comes to security, you just have a token within, our platform. So if you want advanced security, if you wanna really socialize this through a developer portal, and you want in-depth analytics for monitoring, that's where API management comes into place. So you can see the gateway level on top. That's going to help with security and governance. We have 40 plus policies, everything from OAuth, JWT to different transformation policies and things like quota and rate limiting. In terms of socializing, you have a fully white label developer portal and, users external or within your organization can subscribe to your API. They can submit feedback on your API, and they can do all the documentation on on API all from one really easy to use and discoverable interface. So your APIs can actually be consumed and adopted. That's the whole purpose of building them, right, is to make sure that they're consumed and are actually used. And then monitoring. So you'll be able to view performance metrics on your APIs, how long it's taking APIs to respond, how many times APIs are being called, and all of the error codes in granular detail, and you can even build custom dashboards from within our interface. So this slide, I'd like to just walk through quickly to show the breadth and scale at which we're helping customers across a lot of different industries. So you can see the logos on the right, and here's just a few data points. We're up to over 40,000,000,000 records processed each month over five global regions, 900 plus partners, and we're only growing over time. And it's been an awesome journey so far. And we are the only iPaaS on g two top ranked for four consecutive quarters. There's actually an update or amendment to this slide. We were also ranked as an API management g two quadrant leader for the first time this year. So we're really excited to, not only be a leader in iPaaS, but also be a leader in API management, so soon and so quickly after we released our product. So it's really a a testament to some of the results that have been realized by our customers because this is all driven by customer feedback. Next. So if you wanna be more, boots on the ground and really get in touch with our team, we do what's called our Celigo Connective Roadshow. So we basically, bring our product leaders and and different experts within this legal organization and present to you on all the new features and functionality that are coming out recently and in the future road map. So everything from API to EDI to DI. So, those are great to get to not only for networking purpose, but also to make sure, you know, if you're a current customer, if you're really using Soligo to its full potential. And then if you're a prospect, it gives you a chance to talk to our team and talk to fellow customers. So highly recommend. Our next event is actually tomorrow, so it might be a little late for those of you who aren't signed up. That's in Toronto. But we also have an event coming up in Atlanta November 5, so highly encourage you attending that as well. And now I will get into some of the questions. I saw them piling up in the chat. So please submit them now to the q and a tab, and I will make sure to get through everyone. Okay. So I have a question from Mark. I'm newer to these scenarios. I did not understand the relevance or purpose of the API and push step. Okay. So if we go back to this slide, when we think about building an API and really the whole API life cycle, it's more than just building. So you're building an API and API builder. That's great. You've created the service. But what about security? What about making sure that, that you have things like rate limiting in place? That's the secure side. So that's fully handled in API management, or or API gateway through our API gateway. And then there's also an API portal. So if you want this API to actually be adopted by different members of your organization, you wanna socialize that through a portal. That's another piece of API management. And then monitoring as well. So if you want really advanced and detailed analytics under APIs and you wanna really see it through one pane of glass, you'd want API management for that as well. So it's really to scale up your strategy. If it's just a small API you're maybe using for an internal use case, you can get away with, just building it within our platform and maybe exposing that. But if you're building for partners, for consumers, or just building a lot of APIs in general, you really want that management plan to make sure you're securing, socializing, and monitoring your APIs. It's helps with oversight. It helps with security, and it helps your APIs get adopted. Do you support different security policies? Yes. We have 40 plus, policies that we support across security, transformation, and others. If there's something specific, I can, confirm that it's that we include it, but also you can, check it out in our docs page as well. Okay. Looking at separate inventory and pricing, core API is moving to inventory and pricing endpoint. Could this be used with Power BI and data source? Is there a concept of storing this data on Celigo in a cache? Yes. So you could certainly build an API, within Celigo that calls Power BI and different data sources. And then we do have a feature called lookup cache. So it basically allows you to store data like field mappings or environment specific variables on this Celigo platform. So next time you require that data for a lookup, you can just retrieve the stored constant, content instead of reentering mappings or re fetching data from the original source. So that will also make your workflows run more efficiently. That's called lookup cache. Question on documentation or performance tuning. So the overall time out of the API is two minutes, I believe. The time out for each endpoint can also depend on the specific application. And then we do have a cache policy in API that can enhance overall performance. I'm not sure. I can check with our docs team if that's formally in our our documentation. This demo moved a bit quickly. Is there a previous demo that breaks down the information and explains the Celigo tools? So, if you're just looking to kind of understand our iPaaS solution better, we have plenty of resources available, including Celigo University, which really is like a crawl, walk, run approach and starts at the the base level. So maybe it would make sense for you to check out Celigo University first, and then, we will be rolling out a Celigo University specific to API management as well. So that'll start more at the ground level. Okay. How can I route to different API activities like get customer, create us customer, and update customer using a single API? This is a good question. You can actually, right now, you'd build, separate flows, one flow for each operation, like, one flow for get customer, one flow for create customer, one flow for update customer. And then within API management, you can actually join them all together to create, a single API or a single service that could be called. Let's see. I think we have one more question. Can you walk us through how API management works? So, you you saw this was more of a demo of API builder as far as API management goes. So API management, was that screen you saw in the first demo where you had pushed to API management, and, you can see there's a policy studio. There's a portal or hub for for documentation, and then there's analytics and debugging as well. So API management basically works as a way to, oversee all the APIs that you built, whether they're within Celigo API builder or, you built them through some other method. And that shows that you can kind of see them through a single pane of glass. You can implement uniform policies and governance across all of them. So that's how it works at a basic level. We do also have extensive information on API management. So, if you go to our docs at docs.siligo.com, you can, go into our API management portion and find out a lot more info there. Alright. Let's see. I think there's a few more questions. So, is it possible to join them all in Celigo API builder itself? So that's a very good question. The answer is no right now. It would be through API management, but it will change in the very near future. We have a new feature coming out called collections, which will allow you to join together all the different operations within, within our core platform. But that is not available yet. So right now, it would be within API management. In the future, that will change. So the videos you watched right now the question is, will the videos you watch be available in the university? I don't know if these exact videos are available in the university, but we will be sending a full recording. So you can rewatch, both of the demos through that recording, and then, the Celigo University should have additional videos. So Celigo Connector Roadshow. So it's basically, our product team and our marketing team going on the road and showcasing all the different ways that you can use the Celigo platform. It's not for experts only. I would really say that it's for everyone. It could be someone who just wants to scale up and understand the full capability of the platform and network with other users, see how they're using Allego. Or, we do have people who've been building extensively in our platform for a while who find it useful. But I would say that it's it's a wide range of of people from prospects who are just getting familiar with our platform all the way through experts who've been using Celigo for over five years. Can we design or use it as a back end for React like technologies? I think that ultimately depends on your use case, so we would have to go into that more and maybe talk through that with the solutions consultant. But if you're looking to build an API on the back end and expose that service to some sort of application, then, it seems like it's something we can help with. But will Celigo demo this at Suite World? So we will have demo booths available. One of those booths will be focused on our API functionality. So we will be demoing this within our booth. I will be there, so feel free to stop by, and we can give you a personalized demo. And then it will be part of, one of our talks at Sweet World. We won't go into the full demo portion because we only have, like, fifteen or twenty minutes, but we'll be talking through more of the strategy stuff there. So long and short is, the demos will be at the booths. We'll have one for API build and API management. Please come by. And then also, our talk will be more on the the strategy level. We'll be discussing, how we can help you build out an API strategy. Alright. This is a really good question. How to migrate API from one environment to another in API builder? So we have a new feature. It's called cloning, and it's you can look at our recent blog post, as well. I can actually post it into the chat. So I will post this in the chat right now, but this is you basically would use our new cloning feature, which allows for easy versioning and environment promotion, allows you to take an API in dev, promote it into test, and then promote it into prod as well. Alright. I think we're close to done with the questions. Yep. Cool. One more was, an API dashboard would be really useful for better visibility and monitoring of all the APIs in a single window. That actually does exist in API management. So we didn't touch on it in this demo, but we do have a full dashboard that allows you to monitor all the APIs across one pane of glass. So, that is one of the reasons that, you wanna use our management plan in API management. Alright. Well, I don't think we have any more questions. If we do, please post them in the chat. I hope I got to all of them. If I didn't, then please feel free to reach out to me directly, chris.ferraro@soligo.com. And then I also wanted to just plug this screen again. We will be giving $50 gift cards to all of our, net new prospects who would wanna demo with us. So that's all throughout the month of September. Feel free to, request a demo. I think I I think that Alexia will be posting a link in the chat, or you can go to our website and you can request a demo from there. And we look forward to hearing from you. So thanks again, everyone, for joining. Really appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in from pretty much, every area of the world if we saw represented in the beginning, and hope you have a great rest of the day and rest of the week. Looking forward to staying in touch.