REST APIs

You can develop custom applications that use the IBM Security Access Manager for Mobile REST application programming interfaces (APIs). The information about how to use the REST APIs is downloadable from the local management interface.

IBM Security Access Manager for Mobile provides a set of APIs that are implemented based on REST services. The REST APIs are available so that you can administer the management tasks, using JAX-RS, outside of the IBM Security Access Manager for Mobile user interface. This includes exporting and importing configuration from one environment to another or backing up configuration.

Important usage and recovery information

It is the responsibility of the user of the REST APIs to ensure that all payloads are accurate and that dependencies requiring multiple API calls have been properly satisfied. IBM Security Access Manager for Mobile performs schema-level validation, such as ensuring that submitted data is of the proper data type. However, it does not provide the same level of dependency checking that is provided by the local management interface.

To provide rollback capability in the event of a misconfiguration, you can take a snapshot before making the API calls so that if the system gets into an unstable state, you can recover the last known good state. While the snapshot provides complete assurance, restoring a snapshot will result in the loss of any work that had been done by others since the snapshot was taken. Therefore, in conjunction with creating a snapshot, you can issue a GET to retrieve the existing properties, and save the results before each API call. In the event that an API call results in a misconfiguration, you can use the pre-existing properties to construct the payload to use in a correcting API call. Using this approach, you can avoid restoring a snapshot unless absolutely necessary.

Downloading the documentation

The following procedure explains how to download the documentation that describes how to use the REST APIs.

Note: If you use the Chrome version 32.0 browser to access the local management interface, you must start it using the --allow-file-access-from-files argument to be able to view the index.html file from your local directory. For example, use the following command to start Chrome in Windows:
C:\Chrome_path\chrome.exe --allow-file-access-from-files
  1. Log in to the local management interface.
  2. Click Manage System Settings.
  3. Under Secure Settings, click File Downloads.
  4. Expand mga > doc.
  5. Select ISAM-for-Mobile-mgmt-rest-api.zip and click Export.
  6. Save the file and then extract the files from the .zip file.
  7. Open the index.html file in a browser.
Parent topic: Developing for Access Manager for Mobile