Design and Build Great Web APIs

Modeling Our Onboarding API Lifecycle

The process of modeling an API involves collecting all the information you need in order to properly describe the tasks you want to accomplish, the data needed to get that work done, and the process or workflow needed to support all the tasks. For the most part, this is common-sense data collection and description, but it’s important to put together a kind of method or repeatable set of steps that you can use each time you want to model a new API.

It’s likely that you’ll be asked to help a team turn a manual process into a automated one using an API. Sometimes APIs or applications already exist. They do one or more parts of the expected work but don’t work well together. Sometimes just a few parts are ...