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
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.
Flows are used to export data out of one application (source) and import it into another application (destination). A flow is an export linked to one or more imports. A flow can channel data generated by a real-time export, or if real time is not an option, a flow can be scheduled to run on a periodic basis. You can schedule flows to run as often as once per minute; however, only one instance of a flow can run at any given time (i.e. you cannot run the same flow more than once at the same time. If an instance of the flow is still running when a second instance is scheduled, the second instance of the flow does not begin until the first instance completes).
An active flow is a flow that is currently switched on and can be run to move data from system A to B (manually or automatically).
Note: If you have the free edition of integrator.io, only one flow can be active at any given time. With a paid subscription, you can have multiple flows simultaneously enabled. This allows you to strategically plan a set of flows to run simultaneously or consecutively according to your integration goals.
Integrations
An integration is one or more flows set up to achieve your needs for modifying and moving data between systems. An integration can refer to a single flow or a set of flows grouped together in a folder. The folder that contains the flow(s) is an integration and is represented by a rectangular tile on the Home page. You can group flows into integrations however you like. Click the integration tile to manage, modify, and monitor the flows within the integration.
Flow 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, etc. 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 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 allows 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 is a configuration record that contains information about how the data that was exported from the source app should be imported into the destination app's database. An import defines how the data exported from the source app should be written to the destination app's database.
Lookups
A variation of an export is a lookup. For certain use cases, the data you export from the source application may not be sufficient on its own. Some flows require additional data to complement your exported data records. In such cases, you can create a lookup. 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 appication's exported data.
For example, you export data from source application A, but then want to add more data to the exported records, which can be found in application B. You create a lookup to locate the additional relevant data in application B with the data originally exported from source application A to search for it in application B.
Reusing flow components
Connections, imports, exports, and lookups are all stand-alone resource components in integrator.io, and therefore each resource can be used in multiple flows without the need to make a copy of the same object every time. This is only true if you want to use identical resources in multiple flows.
Note: If you have multiple users working in your account, Celigo recommends that you create new resource objects for each individual flow in order to avoid making accidental edits to objects used by flows that serve different purposes. Make sure that each new resource object (connection, import, export, or lookup) has a unique name that easily identifies its use and purpose. Always avoid using vague or identical names for these objects.
Format conversion
A source app's export data is always extracted in its original format. Integrator.io parses the extracted data and converts it into JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. The JSON format is easier to work with, so you will most commonly see JSON data when using integrator.io. To import the data into a destination app that doesn’t support JSON, integrator.io converts the JSON data into the destination app's required format before running the import.
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