Designer Series: Enforcing API Design Standards

Standardization is a buzzword in our industry, and with good reason: we live in a world where development teams span the globe, where your various API designers might be on entirely different continents. This continued globalization means more and more companies are making stricter rules for their APIs, to ensure interoperability between internal teams but also external consumers of their APIs. Some sectors are adopting industry-wide standards, like fin-tech in banking or healthcare with FHIR, where compliance with these rulesets is no longer optional.

In many cases, this means spending costly designer time either reviewing your designs for compliance, to catch any human mistakes (are all date fields ISO formatted? Are all contracts OpenAPI 3.0? Has the description been filled in?) or dealing with issues as the consumers of your APIs report them, potentially creating friction and additional wait time for a fix to be implemented.

SwaggerHub lets you to enforce many of these rules right from the initial design process of your APIs. By creating the rules upfront, your designers will get immediate feedback on the code they’ve written. This avoids mistakes and frustration; ensuring compliance with the standards your company adheres to from the get-go.

In this month’s installment of the Designer Series we will explore:

• How to create rules in SwaggerHub
• How to design custom rules based on regular expressions
• How to use SwaggerHub to enforce your company’s guidelines on API design 
• How to define by severity levels and create consistency across API development teams