Register an application on Finastra’s Developer Portal
If you haven’t yet watched the different videos about discovering our Developer Portal and Building an Application, you can take some time to do so, or continue reading this article!
Finastra’s Developer Portal gives developers the power to use complex and specific financial functionalities to create end user applications. Those functionalities are exposed through the form of REST APIs, which is an industry standard.
You can easily browse all those APIs here : https://developer.fusionfabric.cloud/explore/apis
Using the filters on the left, you can quickly find what you’re looking for !
You can also choose to explore from a Solution point of view : https://developer.fusionfabric.cloud/explore/solutions
This layout gives you a view of a business solution, which is basically a grouping of several APIs to achieve one or many use cases.
As an example, we’re going to work with Corporate Banking, and more specifically, with Accounts Balances & Statement. If you tried to find it by yourselves in our catalog, you should have arrived on this solution : https://developer.fusionfabric.cloud/solution/real-time-account-balances-and-statement.
As you can see, at the time of the writing, 1 API is present, but you can check our public roadmap to see when we’re planning on adding more 😉
Let’s click on the API and analyse together what we’re seeing :
Under “Authentication”, you can see that this API is following the OAuth 2 (1) standard and that the flow will be authorization code (2).
You also have informations regarding the authorization and token URLs as well as the required scopes to use this API, in this case, none.
If you’re not familiar with OAuth 2, I strongly suggest this video which explains it really well, “in plain english” as they say 😊.
Scrolling down or clicking on “Accounts” on the left will show you the following :
We are now getting in the specifics of this API, and reviewing it’s endpoints, which in layman’s terms are the indications about how you access a resource.
- On the left, you can see the list of endpoints, with their methods (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE). This API contains 5 of them which are only using the GET method, enabling you to retrieve data but not add, modify or delete data.
- On the center, we’re displaying the relevant parameters that the endpoint in question can require, as well as the different responses types.
- Finally on the right, you get a collapsible/expandable JSON that describes a sample of the returned data for each response types.
Note that clicking on the endpoint path on the right side will display the full path :
Now that we have identified what we want to use and most importantly, what it will enable us to do, let’s actually use it !
The next steps will actually require you to have an account on Finastra’s developer portal, which you can do by signing up here : https://www.fusionfabric.cloud/sign-up
Go do that, I’ll wait for you in the meantime 😁
You’re back already ? Great ! Let’s get going by registering an Application !
As defined in our glossary, an application is “The custom collection of APIs, SPIs and/or Datasets that you create through the Application Creation Wizard on FusionCreator.”
Do not confuse it with a client application or end user application, which is what you are probably using everyday. It could be a web application, mobile application or even an application for an IoT device such as a car or a TV ! And all of them would be referenced under the FFDC application as they would all be using the same set of APIs, SPIs and Datasets !
Basically, we’re going to create an Application in the Developer Portal, that will describe which APIs we can use, so that when you publish your application and a Financial Institution wants to use it, they will see which APIs your application requires and grant you consent or not.
I like to make the parallel with using apps on your phone, you all have seen the “App XYZ would like to access the Camera” or the microphone or any other API that requires consent from the end user.
To allow this consent granting, our platform has to be aware of which APIs you are going to be using in your final application, hence this registration of what you may or may not be using.
Back to our potatoes !! If you revert to the Solution page, being logged in, you would be able to click on the “Create Application” button below :
Which would bring you to the Application creation wizard :
After having given your app a fine name and description, you can head over to the building blocks by clicking “Next” :
By default, all the APIs from the chosen solution will be preselected, but one more step is needed : you need to specify the Reply URLs since our APIs are using a Authorization Code grant flow. For now, you can do as I did and put a wildcard “*”, but before going to production, be sure to set this up to an actual server that you and only you own 😉.
Keen readers, might have noticed that you can add SPIs and Datasets on top of APIs, but this will probably be for a future article !
After blindly accepting the terms and conditions (which 90% of us do 😳), you are greeted with a summary of all that you selected and upon clicking on “Create Application”, you will finally be able to see something like this :
As you can see, in the API Credentials section, you can copy the client ID and also generate keys. Let’s generate a secret key, that we will use as a client Secret :
Once you have your client ID and secret pair ready, you are set to use it in a server side application, and use the aforementioned APIs to build an awesome experience, and why not, be published on our store one day ? 😉
If you liked this article :
- Add some 👏
- Share it
- Follow our Medium Publication
- Try to make some apps using our Developer Portal & Design System
- … or all of the above 😆
Till next time !
