To run through this exercise, you will need to have done the following steps:
Prerequisite 1: Installed the API Connect toolkit (Exercise 1).
Prerequisite 2: Generated a LoopBack app (Exercise 3).
Prerequisite 3: Created a database service on Bluemix and connected it to your LoopBack app (Exercise 4).
Prerequisite 4: Created database CRUD APIs in the API Designer (Exercise 5).
Prerequisite 5: Deployed your LoopBack application to Bluemix (Exercise 6).
In exercise 7, you tested your APIs locally and deployed them to Bluemix. To see where you deployed the APIs, we'll access the API Manager you used in exercise 2.
Navigate to the Bluemix console at (https://new-console.ng.bluemix.net) and ensure you are logged in. Choose APIs using the drop-down at the top, and select your API Connect service. This launches the previously created API Manager.
Let's explore the APIs you just pushed. Hit the Explore button on the top right, and choose the Sandbox catalog. This takes us to a view similar to the Explore view on the API Designer that we used in Exercise 6. The main difference is that this time, we are testing these APIs hosted by an application on Bluemix.
On the left, click on the app you just pushed, which is the name of your LoopBack application created earlier.
In this view, we can explore all the APIs in the chosen catalog.
Navigate to the operation GET /Employees. Along the right side, there is a black section which shows you how to call that operation, shows a sample response, and has a button "Call Operation". Hit the button to call your GET operation.
This should return a list of the employees in the database.
Navigate to the operation POST /Employees to create a database entry. Scroll down to the "Call Operation" button, enter some data into the Paramters section (or use the Generate button), and hit call Operation.
You should see a 200 OK response, as well as a response body indicating that the database update has succeeded. You can now call the GET /Employees operation again to see the employee entry you just created.
We explored the app that was pushed in the previous exercise to Bluemix.
Next we will look into how to use the API connect Manager on Bluemix which provide an interface similar to what we saw locally. We will go through the Getting Started tour which will bring together the different artifacts and how they are connected in Exercise 8.