API Documentation (K-Flow)

The demand for APIs will continue to rise due to the ever-increasing need to design cutting-edge features and services. Whether we realise it or not, companies of all sizes have built their businesses on APIs and developer services that enable these companies to release customer-benefit faster and more often – for competitive advantage.

Developers are eager to learn how to make use of your APIs. Therefore, documentation is extremely important when it comes to “time-to-first call”. Developers need API documentation that is comprehensive, well-designed, and easy-to-use. Essentially, it is the crux of usability for an API. Poorly written documentation leads to a world of difficulty for developers. The more difficult it is to understand and consume the API, the higher the chance of the API not delivering value.

Developer Experience is critical, and hence API documentation takes centre stage.

K-Flow will provide enterprise users the ability to model API workflows low code, intuitive, drag-and-drop, no code, leading to powerful API documentation.

Aspects key to our solution for API documentation

  • A no-code interface for creating, editing and previewing these flows
  • First-class support for OpenAPI and Swagger
  • Export to pure-HTML for publishing or internal-collaboration
  • Showing how multiple APIs are called in sequence as a business workflow
  • Showing variations of a given API due to business-rules

All of the above integrated within your IDE, starting with Visual Studio Code.

K - Flow Features

Industry Use Case

Let us take the inherent complexities of the Travel Industry as an example. There is a lack of standardization of API payloads across the travel and hospitality providers such as hotels and airlines.  Use-cases typically involve a set of API calls that are to be made in sequence. The business rules that drive the API behaviour are intricate, and often undocumented.

This leads to a severe problem which is that the cost of connecting to an API is high and the problem compounds by the number of API providers you need to integrate with.

With K-Flow, you can model a sequence of API calls along with the variations that changes in data cause such as edge cases or error responses. You can re-use your existing OpenAPI or Swagger API specification files and even compose them into complex flows. Your development teams and product owners will be able to see how end-users flow through your system and the business rules that are exercised.

Once modelled, you can export rich, interactive HTML documentation for your API consumers or project stakeholders to use. Collaboration and discussions around your API, what it does, the business benefits, and the end-user experience, will be greatly elevated.

To ensure that API documentation is up-to-date and accurate, you can even validate the API calls against a live system. You can also use the API model as an API mock (coming soon), which enables you to provide an API playground to your consumers or front-end teams.

We aim to enable developers work collaboratively with product owners and your API consumers to deliver end-user benefit faster, and more often. Get started with K-Flow by installing our Visual Studio Code extension.

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