Introduction

This portion of the documentation is intended for software developers creating their own applications and looking to add both internal and customer-facing integration capabilities with other software. With Monkedo’s Integration Provider as a Service (iPaaS) feature, developers can build internal connections within their organization as well as offer integration options for their end users to connect external accounts in third-party apps with their software. If you aren’t developing your own software or don’t need to add integrations, these features are not necessary.

Integration Provider as a Service (iPaaS) is a cloud-based platform that enables seamless connectivity, data integration, and automation between diverse applications and systems, allowing organizations to streamline workflows and data sharing without extensive custom development.

Monkedo serves as both an automation platform and an integration provider, enabling streamlined and scalable connectivity between your application and a broad range of third-party systems. Monkedo act as central integration hubs in the cloud. Here’s what Monkedo's iPaaS features provide:

• Centralized Integration Platform: Monkedo centralizes and simplifies integrations with third-party applications, allowing companies to unify data across various tools and automate workflows with minimal effort.

• Low-Code/No-Code Environment: Monkedo offers an intuitive no-code automation design editor and low-code integrations just by calling our API, allowing even non-developers to set up integrations.

• Scalable Cloud Infrastructure: Monkedo operates in the cloud, scaling with an organization’s integration needs and handling large volumes of data.

• Secure Data Handling: Security is built into Monkedo, providing data encryption and token storage for data privacy and security.

• Authentication Management: With support for OAuth, API key handling, and other authentication flows, Monkedo simplifies and automatically handles secure connection authorization across integrated systems.

Monkedo’s integration provider feature allows you to use it in two key ways in the app you’re developing:

1. Internal Integrations: Connect your own company’s accounts on third-party apps to enhance your app’s functionality.

2. Customer-Facing Integrations: Allow your users to connect their accounts in other apps, enabling seamless integration between your app and the software they already use.

With internal integrations, you can connect your software with third-party applications using your organization’s own accounts. Since Monkedo already offers automation features for these use cases, there’s no additional setup needed to use internal integrations. You can set up bidirectional workflows that allow your app to communicate with other software as follows:

1. From Your App to Other Apps: Create an automation in Monkedo that’s triggered by a Webhook Trigger. Once set up, your app can initiate actions on integrated third-party apps by sending an HTTP request to this webhook.

2. From Other Apps to Your App: Similarly, you can configure automations that start from app triggers or other triggers within Monkedo. These workflows can send data or trigger actions within your software by sending HTTP requests from the automation to your app.

In the remainder of this documentation, we’ll focus on customer-facing integrations.

Customer-facing integrations enable you to connect your software to third-party applications in a way that lets your users link their accounts on those apps. With Monkedo’s integration provider feature, this process is handled completely in the background, meaning your users don’t see Monkedo or leave your application during the integration flow.

For example, suppose you’re developing a tool called Awesome App that manages events like meetings and trainings. Your customers might ask for integration with Google Calendar to sync their events, or with Slack to receive event notifications. Without Monkedo, you’d need to read through documentation, handle OAuth, store access tokens, and manage API interactions. This development process can be time-consuming and complex.

Instead, Monkedo manages the entire integration process, allowing you to focus on your core application development. Here’s how Monkedo handles the complexities:

1. Authorization Handling: Monkedo manages all authorization flows, from simple API keys to OAuth 2.0. You don’t need to write code for authorization; Monkedo’s Frontend SDK handles the authorization flow, including showing modal dialogs to collect API keys and redirection to the third-party app’s authorization page. For example, Monkedo can open Google Calendar's authorization page and handle the entire authorization flow.

2. Secure Token Storage: Monkedo securely requests and stores access tokens or API keys, sparing you the complexity of secure credential management.

3. Calling The API: Monkedo provides a set of app components to perform actions on integrated apps, making it easy to interact with third-party APIs without coding requests from scratch.

4. Workflow Automation: Use Monkedo’s simple no-code editor to design workflows, replacing manual API handling within your code with a simplified automation. Just create an automation that creates a Google Calendar event and another automation that sends a Slack notification with the data that will be provided to the automations. After that you can run this automation by using Monkedo API.

5. Automatic Token Refreshing: Monkedo refreshes tokens automatically when they expire, so you don’t have to write additional code for token lifecycle management.

Getting started with Monkedo’s integration provider feature is straightforward:

1. Setup Project: In Monkedo, enable Developer Mode and create a project for your app. Select the third-party apps you’d like to integrate.

2. Create Automations: Each action you want to perform on an integrated app corresponds to an automation within Monkedo. Use the no-code automation editor to set up these actions.

3. Start Authorization: Add the Monkedo Frontend SDK to your app and call the authorization function. Monkedo will manage the entire process, displaying any necessary modals or redirecting the user as needed.

4. Run Automations: Call Monkedo’s API to trigger the automations you created. The automation will use the API key or access token of the user you specified when calling Monkedo's API, allowing personalized actions on the third-party app for each user. This way the same automation workflow can perform actions on different user's accounts.

The best part is that this all happens seamlessly for the user. While Monkedo works in the background to manage the integration, users see only your application and interact with it without leaving or needing to configure anything directly with Monkedo.

In the following sections, we’ll cover each of these steps in detail to help you get the most out of Monkedo’s integration capabilities.