Building the Route

After successfully establishing connections between both applications we wish to integrate (by selecting a connection method), it’s now time to start enabling data exchange. As per our example, this means retrieving data from our Picqer warehouse management software and sending it to our Shopify e-commerce web shop. Let’s explore how this all works in action.

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Step 2: Configuring the integration

To create, automate, transform, and orchestrate an integration between applications (Shopify and Picqer) via the Alumio iPaaS, we start by creating a new Route as follows:

1. Start with a Route: Select the “Integrations” option from the navbar and click on the “Routes” section from the dropdown to start building your integration.

2. Create a new route: From the Route overview, click on the plus icon to start building a new Route.

3. Name your integration: Within the Route-building interface that appears, give your Route a clear name and description in order to easily identify, search, and define your integration. Best practices would involve naming the applications you wish to integrate and indicate the data flow.

4. Build an Incoming Configuration: To build the first part of your integration, you need to first retrieve data from your source system (Picqer, as per our example). To achieve this, you need to build an Incoming Configuration on the Route by performing the following actions:

a. Enter incoming details: In the interface to build the Incoming Configuration, you need to start by giving it a name and a description that defines what kind of data it will retrieve from the source app.

b. Choose a Subscriber: To define how Alumio receives data from a source application, you next have to choose a relevant Subscriber and HTTP request method. As you can see, in the screenshot below, we’ve selected the Picqer Subscriber from the drop-down menu and the request method we’ve picked is “GET”, which is an HTTP method used to retrieve data.

c. Select an entity: Next, in order to choose what specific data you wish to receive from the application via the Incoming Configuration, you have to choose a data “Entity” or a specific type of data. As per our example, since we want to integrate product data from Picqer with Shopify, we select the entity “Get all products.”

d. Choose the HTTP client: Most importantly, we next need to choose the Picqer HTTP client we created right at the start of building your integration, in order to define your connection method.

e. Save incoming: With that, we’ve configured our Incoming Configuration successfully to pull in product data from Picqer into the Alumio iPaaS. We can now save the Incoming Configuration and go back to configuring the rest of your Route.

Note: The additional options that you see on the interface are optional fields that you can choose to configure to customize your connection further.

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5. Building an Outgoing Configuration: The next step to completing our Route is to create the Outgoing Configuration. This will help define the target application (Shopify) we wish to send the data we’ve retrieved to. You need to select the Outgoing Configuration option from the Route interface by pressing the '+' icon next to the field, and then perform the following actions:

a. Enter outgoing details: In the interface to build the Outgoing Configuration, you need to start by giving it a name and a description that will specify what data you will send to the target application.

b. Choose a Publisher: To define how Alumio sends data to the target application, you next have to choose a relevant Publisher and HTTP request method. As you can see, in the screenshot below, we’ve selected the Shopify Publisher from the drop-down menu. The request method picked is “POST”, which is an HTTP method used to create new items in another application.

c. Select an entity: Next, in order to choose what specific data you wish to send to the application via the Outgoing configuration, you have to choose a data “Entity” or a specific type of data. As per our example, since we want to integrate product data from Picqer with Shopify, we select the “Create a new Product” entity in Shopify.

d. Choose the HTTP client: Similar to the Incoming Configuration, we need to complete our Outgoing configuration by choosing the Shopify HTTP client we created right at the start of this walkthrough.

e. Save outgoing: We’ve now configured our Outgoing Configuration successfully to send the Picqer product data to Shopify via the Alumio iPaaS. We can save the Outgoing Configuration and go back to completing our Route.

6. Ready the Route to run: Going back to the Route-building interface for sending “Picqer Products to Shopify,” you can now see that we’ve successfully built and attached an Incoming and Outgoing Configuration to it. This completes the Route on a basic level.

a. Save the Route: To get ready to run the Route, check all the details one last time and then click on the “Save and continue” option.

b. Run the Incoming: You can choose to run the entire Route directly. However, when first configuring a Route, in order to check if everything works, you can manually run the Incoming configuration first. This allows you to check if the Alumio iPaaS is retrieving data correctly from the Source system.

c. Check new Tasks: Within the Route interface, there are several tabs: Edit, Version Control, Logs, Scheduled Jobs, Alerts, Tasks, Relations. You have to choose the “Tasks” tab in order to check if running your Incoming configuration manually has successfully pulled in data from Picqer. If you see Tasks created with the status “NEW,” it means your Incoming configuration works. If the status is “Failed,” then you have to reconfigure it by checking the logs to see what went wrong.

d. Run the Route: Now that we’ve successfully checked if Alumio is pulling in the right data from the source application, we can now try sending this data to the target application. In order to do this, we need to run the Route.

e. Finished Tasks: After running the Route, you can refresh the Task page within the Route to check and see if the data has been successfully integrated (from Picqer to Shopify — as per our example). If the status of the Tasks changes from “New” to “Finished” it means that the integration is successful.

Please note: You can click on each Taskand navigate to the Entity Data tab within it to visualize the data that’s being integrated (the product data from Picqer to Shopify) in JSON format.

f. Check logs: After running the Route, to check all the data that has been exchanged in detail via the integration, you simply select the “Logs” tab within the Route. On the surface, this overview will show you all the dates, times, and duration of Route activity, its memory usage, and the number of Tasks generated, failed, or filtered.

g. Log details: Click the “Logs” option to see the details of every single occurrence and data exchange after the Route has been run within the Alumio iPaaS.

7. Check the integration: The final step to checking if your integration is actually working via Alumio is to check your actual application to see if the new data has been sent to it. As per our example, we need to check Shopify to see if products from Picqer have been successfully integrated within it.

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This concludes a very basic walkthrough of how you can configure your first integration, test it, and run it manually. However, apart from helping you build connections rapidly between endpoints, the Alumio iPaaS is designed to also help you automate, transform, and orchestrate your integrations. So with our next lesson, let’s now delve into how you can Schedule and automate this integration intelligently, and how you can apply some basic Transformers to customize this integration.