Connections

Connections contain the information necessary for the steps in your integration to connect to third-party apps and services. A connection is a special type of config variable that is made up of fields for things like usernames, passwords, API keys, OAuth 2.0 secrets, host endpoints, API versions, and more - whatever a component needs to know to connect to an outside service.

For example, the Amazon S3 component requires an access key ID and secret access key as part of its connection, and the the Tableau component requires a host name, site ID, token, and token name.

Adding a connection to an integration

When you add a step to your integration that requires a connection, that step will be bound to a connection config variable that represents that connection. If a connection config variable for that component doesn't exist yet, a new one will be created. One connection config variable can be used for multiple steps (so, all of your Amazon S3 steps can reference a single connection config variable).

The config variable that is referenced will contain the information necessary for the step to connect to the outside app or service. You can provide default values for the connection's input fields, or you can choose to have customers enter their own values when they deploy an instance of the integration.

You can control the visibility of each field of a connection config variable by clicking the icon. You can choose to show the field to customer users, make it settable programmatically in embedded, or hide it entirely from customers.

Configuring connections for instances

When your team member configures an instance for a customer, or the customer enables the integration for themselves, they are prompted to enter values for each connection input field.