Enabling Eventing in Open Connectors

[Former Member]

Receiving timely events from cloud applications is critical in creating event-driven integration workflows.  This blog will showcase how to enable events in your authenticated Open Connector.

Open Connectors currently supports building integrations with polling or webhooks capability.  With polling enabled, the built-in polling engine will execute a configured query every n minutes and captures the changed information.  With webhooks, the API provider updates the Open Connector with what information has changed. Some API providers require some additional configuration setup for Event Managment that can be found in the individual API docs.

Beginning in the Cloud Platform trial environment, find services, filter to integration and click on the Open Connectors tile.  Once enabled click "Go to Service".



Once in the Open Connector service, click on the connector you want events from, in this example, I am using SalesForce Sales Cloud.  In the configuration page toggle the "Event Configuration" to turn on eventing, then pick from either polling or webhooks.  Note, that if the application provider does not support webhooks then polling will be the default.





In this example, I will choose polling so I can decide how frequently the events will hit my workflow.  This will also show all of the endpoints that will be polled on this frequency and you can toggle individual endpoints on or off for your event payload.  The polling setting will default to 5 minutes.



You can change the minutes to occur more often, setting them to 1 minute for near real-time events on applications that only support polling can create a "webhook-like" experience across all of your Open Connectors.  This also automatically updates the CURL command on the right.



Click create an instance and complete the authentication flow.  This example uses SalesForce OAuth flow, allowing permissions to authenticate the connector.  Once you have authenticated, you should see this screen.



To quickly edit an active connectors eventing configuration.  Just click on the "Connectors" tab and authenticated connectors automatically come to the top.  By hovering and clicking on the blue bubble under the title you can then view that connector's instances page and edit the instance.





Adjust the polling intervals and then click "Update" to update the connector without having to re-authenticate even if you are switching eventing types (from polling to webhooks or webhooks to polling).



When deciding the frequency of your events, keep in mind the overall integration workflow you are trying to accomplish and when data needs to be refreshed.  Open Connectors allows you to have near-real-time across any application but isn't needed if your larger workflow only occurs hourly or daily.