Introduction to Components

A component is a portion of reusable code that accomplishes a specific task, or connects with an outside service. For example, the SFTP component allows integrations to download and modify files on an SFTP server. The Slack component posts messages to Slack channels.

Several components are strung together to form an integration. A very simple integration might use the Amazon S3 component to pull down a file from S3, and post the contents of the file to a Slack channel using the Slack component.

Complex integrations might be comprised of dozens of actions.

Prismatic-provided components

Prismatic offers a wide array of components to accomplish a variety of things, like serializing data formats, invoking REST endpoints, or interacting with commonly-used SaaS platforms like AWS, Slack, or Dropbox - see our component catalog for a full list of components. Source code for some Prismatic-provided components is available on GitHub.

You can read about components within the web app by clicking the Components link on the left-hand sidebar. For more detail about a particular component, click the Component > link of the component you want to know more about.

Custom components

The majority of your integrations can likely be developed using Prismatic-provided components. For the portions of your integrations that are specific to your industry or product, Prismatic provides the ability to run your own code as part of your integration. You can deploy your own code in the form of reusable custom components or short code component steps.

For More Information: When Should I Use a Custom Component vs a Code Component?

Component actions

Components contain one or more actions that can be invoked. For example, the Amazon S3 component contains actions to copy S3 objects, delete objects, get an object's contents, etc.

Web App

You can view the actions of a component by clicking Components on the left-hand sidebar of the web app, and then clicking into a component. You will see the actions a component contains, required credentials to execute those actions, and inputs the actions take.

CLI

The components:actions:list CLI subcommand lists all component actions. The --filter flag allows you to filter results. The expression you pass to --filter uses regex pattern matching (hence the ^ and $)

List actions of the Amazon S3 component whose keys start with 'delete'

prism components:actions:list aws-s3 --filter 'Key=^delete'

 Label         Description
 ───────────── ────────────────────────────────────
 Delete Object Delete an Object within an S3 Bucket

API

In this query we list the label of each of component, and the label and description of each of their respective actions.

query {
  components {
    nodes {
      label
      actions {
        nodes {
          label
          description
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

For More Information: Custom Component Actions

Component authorization methods

Some components require credentials to interact with a SaaS provider, REST endpoint, etc. Those credentials might be username/password sets, API keys, OAuth2 tokens, etc.

To see what authorization methods a component can use, click the Components link on the left-hand sidebar and select a component. Authorization methods will be listed in the component description page.

Component connections

A connection is the mechanism by which a component authenticates with a third-party app or service. A connection is an input and might contain a username/password set, API key, OAuth 2.0 token, or some other proprietary authentication type.

Component developers define the fields that make up a connection. For example, a connection for one component might require a tenant ID and API key. The single config variable representing that connection would be made up of two fields: one for tenant ID and one for API key.

Component versioning

Components are versioned. The first time a component is published it is given version "1". Thereafter, each time the component is republished its version number increments by one.

Within the integration designer, you can choose which version of a component to use. Components marked in grey are using the latest version, and components marked with yellow have newer versions available.

In most cases, you'll will want to use the latest version of each component. For the sake of stability and consistency, though, versions of components used in integrations are not bumped to the latest version automatically. This prevents unintended issues in your integration if your team member were to publish a broken custom component. You can keep an integration pinned to component "version 6" for example, while your team members experiment with a newer "version 7" of a custom component for another integration.

When your team publishes a new version of a custom component, or when Prismatic publishes a new version of a built-in component, you will see an notification in the integration designer on the Component Versions button indicating that some components are outdated. To upgrade those components, click the Component Versions button and select CHANGE VERSION for the component whose version you want to change.

For More Information: Choosing Component Versions