Learn key concepts

Welcome to Celigo, and congratulations on creating your integrator.io account. You now have the ability to create integrations with one or more active flows. 

Contents

• Flows and integrations
• Components (Resources)
  • Connections
  • Exports
  • Imports
  • Lookups

Flows and integrations

A flow is a stream of data between two or more systems or applications. The data is exported from one or more systems, processed via user-defined settings in integrator.io, and then imported into other systems.

An integration consists of one or more flows set up to achieve your needs for modifying and moving data between systems. An integration can include many components that allow applications to interact and transfer data between databases. For example, you may need an integration if you want to input customer data from one application to another, or if you want to update inventory information in two individual applications.

Components (Resources)

When building a flow, you must first identify the systems or applications that you want to either import data into, or export data from. For example, a flow might theoretically sync data between Salesforce and NetSuite, Hubspot and Shopify, or other systems. The system or application that you export data from in a flow is called a source application. The system that you import data into from a flow is called a destination application.

Connections

In order to import or export data from a source app or a destination app, you must create a connection to that system. A connection stores the login credentials and other information needed to retrieve or send data through the API for a given source app or destination app.

You can create a connection by logging in to the application via integrator.io with your username, password, API key, or other credential(s) required by the system. A connection enables you to get data out of a source app (export), or put data into a destination app (import). 

Exports

Once you create the connections for the source app and the destination app, you can start pulling data out of the source app by creating an export. An export is a configuration record that defines the data criteria to extract from the source app's database. Data is exported from a system in pages. Each page contains a set of data records from the source app's database. 

Imports

An import defines how the data exported from the source app should be written to the destination app's database. You can filter data and map data to specific fields to ensure only the relevant data is imported.

Lookups

A lookup is similar to an export in the sense that it retrieves data from an application's database, but instead of generating new pages and data records, it adds that data to the exported data records. Lookups use the source data from an export to identify the additional data in an application to merge with the original source application’s exported data.

You can also read more about Celigo terminology and working with JSON data in integrator.io.