What is AppConnect?

Insightly’s AppConnect is an enterprise-grade workflow automation platform and provides the ease of use expected from consumer apps, enabling businesses and IT professionals to quickly build workflow automations.

Insightly’s AppConnect gives users the ability to build integrations with other 3rd party applications, then automate repetitive processes between Insightly and those apps with Recipes, which are highly customizable workflows utilizing steps, actions, and triggers.

• What is AppConnect?
• Community Library
• Definitions
• How to enable
• How to add a connection
• How to use
• Learn more

What is AppConnect?

AppConnect is an application that allows users to build integrations between Insightly and thousands of different apps and services. These integrations are built using workflows called Recipes.

Recipes

Recipes are a set of steps that AppConnect will follow to get work done between your apps. Recipes have many advanced features, allowing them to handle all app integration and workflow automation scenarios, including complex data transformations, conditional triggers and actions, and duplicate detection.

A Recipe allows AppConnect to interact with another application through a series of triggers and actions. Triggers monitor for events that occur in the application you have connected to. Actions carry out specific pre-defined operations in the target application.

Recipes can be created in the Assets section of AppConnect. Additionally, users can review any Recipes that have been created.

Edit page

By clicking on one of the Recipes, users will be directed to the Recipe’s edit page. Here, you can edit, clone, and delete the Recipe. Users can also start the recipe from this page.

Additionally, users can review several other informational tabs:

• Recipe - The steps and configuration of the Recipe.

• Jobs - When an active recipe processes a trigger event and runs the sequence of actions, as defined in the recipe logic, it creates a job. Each job holds a unique trigger event and executes its Recipe logic based on that data. All job activity is recorded in the Jobs tab.

• Connections - Displays which apps are used in the Recipe.

• Versions - A log of each version of the Recipe. This log records when a Recipe was created or updated, what type of change was made, and who it was modified by. Each time the Recipe is updated, its version number will increase by 1.
  The current version will be marked as Current. Click on another version to see how it differed from the current version and restore it if needed.

• Settings - Contains Recipe Resources, a Description box for the Recipe, and a link to privately share the Recipe.

Community Library

The Community Library is a fast and easy way to get a head-start on your integrations. This library contains user-built Recipes and user-built custom connectors, which can be searched and filtered by the different apps available.

Community Recipes

Recipes added to the Community Library are useful template recipes that have been shared by Insightly and other users.

The apps available can be searched by name and category, or users can select one of Insightly’s recommended apps.

To get more granular, you can select a second app that works with the first app selected to pull up all Recipe templates that utilize both apps.  Each Recipe must be connected to the Insightly app.

Definitions

Connector SDK

The Connector SDK builder can be accessed under the Tools section dropdown.

Connectors built on the SDK are called custom connectors. These connectors are only visible and available to the owner by default. After the connector is built and ready, it can be shared publicly.

Use our SDK to build your own connector for apps that aren’t supported. The supported data types include JSON, XML, and URL-encoded or multipart forms.

Task

A Task is a unit of work that occurs every time a Recipe performs an action that requires compute resources. 

A Recipe may consist of multiple Tasks. The number of Tasks executed in a job depends on the data of the specific trigger event and the Recipe logic. 

Monthly Task limits that can be purchased:

• 25k: 25,000 Tasks/Month

• 100k: 100,000 Tasks/Month

• 250K: 250,000 Tasks/Month

• 500k: 500,000 Tasks/Month

For more details, please click here. 

In general, all successfully run actions in a job are counted as Tasks and failed actions are not counted.

• All successfully run actions in the called Recipe will be counted

• All successfully run actions via jobs rerun (e.g. UI, API, Recipe ops) are counted

• Successfully run actions in a failed job are counted. For example, if job fails at step 5, step 1-4 are counted

The following table shows a breakdown of how Tasks are counted with the different Recipe steps:

Dashboard

This section allows users to review how their Recipes are performing. This page displays a basic overview dashboard, the plan usage, app connections, and Recipe activity.

Choose the Time Period, Folder, and other filters, then AppConnect will display the number of Successful Jobs, Failed Jobs, number of Recipes used, and Tasks used.

Users can also track their usage on the Billing & Account page, which updates with every 10% of usage.

Connections 

This section allows users to review any connected applications and add any other applications they want to integrate with.

Each connection is listed in this section and displays the Connection name, Time connected, and Status of the connection. Clicking on a connection from the list will open a page with more details, including the Recipes that are using this connection.

Lookup tables

Lookup tables can be accessed under the Tools section dropdown. Lookup tables, similar to cross-reference tables, can be imported or manually built to lookup frequently used data easily in a recipe.

Lookup tables have a 10 columns limit and 10,000 entries maximum. CSV files are required for importing.

Properties

Properties can be accessed under the Tools section dropdown. A property is composed of a name and its corresponding value. Properties allow you to store account-wide Recipe configuration parameters.

Create name-value style properties that can be looked up in recipes. The property’s value is looked up each time a job is executed. They show up in all Recipes as usable values under the Properties data tree. When a recipe is active, the value for the property is looked up in account properties.

Account-level properties are also known as environment variables or configuration variables. They are useful for complex deployment models across connections and recipes.

For example, you can have a property that indicates where to send a notification email. All Recipes can look this value up and send email to the same recipient.

For sensitive fields, use 'password', 'key', 'secret' in the name to hide the value. You can have up to 100 properties.

How to enable

Once enabled, a default Insightly Connector is created, the account owner will be added, and admins will need to add the users they want to have access to AppConnect.

To enable, talk to the Insightly sales team sales@insightly.com. Once AppConnect is enabled, it cannot be disabled.

1. Go to System Settings > AppConnect.

2. Click Add User.

3. Select a user from the dropdown. Click Add User.

Once AppConnect has been enabled, it can be accessed by users with access from the nine-dot menu at the top right of the screen.

How to add a connection

1. Go to Assets > Connections. Click Create a Connection.

2. Select an App.

3. Enter a name. Select which folder the connection will be created in.

4. Enter all required information. If applicable, enter the API key and the API host; this step is not required by all apps you will connect to. 

5. Click Connect.

Clicking the connection on the App Connections page will direct users to the connection’s edit page. From this page, users can click Disconnect to disconnect the App from AppConnect or click Delete connection to delete the connection from AppConnect. A connection cannot be deleted if it used in active Recipes.

Once enabled, a default Insightly connection will be created.

How to use

These instructions go over the basics of building a Recipe. If you’d like more in-depth examples, read AppConnect Example Recipes.

1. Go to Assets > Recipes. Click Create a recipe.

2. Enter a name for the Recipe. If this field is left empty, a name will be auto-generated.

3. Select which folder the Recipe will be created in.

4. Select a starting point:

   • Trigger from an app

   • Run on a schedule

   • Trigger from a webhook

   • Manage other recipes

   • Build callable recipe

   • Build an API endpoint

   • Build a Slack bot command

5. Click Start building.

6. The first step is to setup a trigger. Click Select an app and trigger event.

   • First, select an app you’ve already connected to or select an app from All Apps.

   • Next, select the trigger event.

   • Select an Active Connection or add a new connection.

   • The setup step will be dependant on the app chosen. For example, if you chose Insightly CRM, you would select an object (Any CRM, Marketing, or custom objects. You will need permission to interact with the object.).

   • Optionally you can set a trigger condition, where only trigger events matching specified condition will be processed.

7. Under Actions, click the + icon.

8. Choose what happens next:

   • Action in an app

   • IF condition

   • IF/ELSE condition

   • Repeat action

   • Call recipe

   • Stop job

   • Handle errors

9. Throughout the Recipe workflow, users can add more actions by clicking other + icons.

10. Click the Save button in the upper right of the screen to save your progress as needed.

11. To the right of the Save button, click Test to check if the Recipe has been setup correctly.
    Testing a Recipe checks if it will perform as the user intended and ensures that the expected result is correct.

    If errors are detected, the steps that are causing the errors will be highlighted. Click on the step to review what needs to be fixed.

12. When you are finished working on the Recipe, click Exit.

13. When you’re ready to run the Recipe, click Start Recipe. The Recipe can be stopped at any time.

Learn more

To learn more about AppConnect, read the following articles:

1. AppConnect Example Recipes
2. AppConnect Data Types and Formulas
3. AppConnect Data Types and Formulas: String
4. AppConnect Data Types and Formulas: Integer or number
5. AppConnect Data Types and Formulas: Date or datetime
6. AppConnect Data Types and Formulas: Array/hash (list)
7. Building AppConnect Recipes: Triggers
8. Building AppConnect Recipes: Steps
   
   
9. Building AppConnect Recipes: Actions
   
   
10. Building AppConnect Recipes: IF conditions
11. Running AppConnect Recipes
12. Running AppConnect Recipes: Tasks
13. Running AppConnect Recipes: Start
14. Running AppConnect Recipes: Skip
15. Running AppConnect Recipes: Stop
16. Running AppConnect Recipes: Test
17. Running AppConnect Recipes: Jobs
18. Troubleshooting Recipes