Using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), you can enable business-to-business communication between trading partners by integrating Trading Networks with a API Gateway instance.

You can associate an API Gateway instance with Trading Networks to expose the APIs available in API Gateway and manage API access for each partner. When you add an API to a partner for the first time, a new application with the partner name is created in API Gateway. Any addition or removal of API access to that partner in Trading Networks is updated in the corresponding application on API Gateway. All the supported API types such as REST, ODATA, or SOAP can be exposed to your partners using partner profiles. As an administrator, you can either create a new user or provide access to an existing user in Trading Networks to add or remove API access from the Partner Profile page.

The access details such as the API key and authentication mechanism of the associated API Gateway instance appears on the API tab of the Partner Profiles page. For instructions on how to invoke an API, see the webMethods API Portal Consumer's Guide.