Understand Connectors
Note:
- Connections to services hosted in different data centers may involve cross-border data transfers. While Zoho Creator handles data securely, ensure this aligns with your organization’s data residency and compliance requirements before proceeding.
- The existing version of PayPal, PayflowPro, and Payments Pro has been deprecated on 26th September, 2024 and none of the payment transactions will be processed after this date. To ensure uninterrupted payment processing, migrate to the latest version. Learn more
Overview
Connectors allow Zoho Creator applications to communicate with third-party services. It contains the properties required to connect to a particular service and reduces the complexity, thereby, establishing a secure connection.
Let us consider a situation where you must connect with PayPal to create a payment workflow in your application. Conventionally, you must write lines of code describing the required parameters for API calls. As PayPal has OAuth2 authentication, you need to regenerate the access tokens using the refresh token whenever the token expires. This entire process can be automated using a connector.
The connector is configured with the required parameters to create the connection with the service. It regenerates the token automatically when the token expires. Once a connector is created, it can be reused to create multiple connections with that service. It makes the authorization parameters secure, as they will be accessible only to the admins of the Creator account.
In Zoho Creator the connectors are distinguished as:
Built-in Connectors
Zoho Creator includes a set of connectors that have been preconfigured with the Zoho Creator applications. These connectors perform REST operations from the cloud services. As they are preconfigured, they are simple to use and enable you to create a connection quickly.
Note: The connections created using the built-in connectors can be used in Data sources, Deluge scripts in Workflows, and Payment workflows. List of supported Built-in Connectors
Zoho Creator supports 1000+ built-in connectors which cover every business requirement of an organization. Comprehensive details about each connector, like categories, supported functionalities and data center availability, can be found on the Built-in Connectors of Zoho Creator page.
Custom Connectors
Note: This feature is only available in C6.Custom Connector enables you to integrate your Zoho Creator application with other third-party cloud services which are not available in Built-in Connectors. You can configure your own connectors for services with Basic, API Key and OAuth2 authentication.
Once a connector is created and connection is established, you can use it to perform REST operations on the target service from Zoho Creator. For example, to access your Google Drive account using Google's REST APIs, you can create a custom Google connector, establish a connection and connect to it, and use this connection to perform the specified integrations to your connected Google account.
Flow of creating a Custom Connector
Obtain API from the target service
In order to create a custom connector, you need an API to communicate with the target service. These API's can be:
- Public - Publicly available on the internet. For example, Slack, Shopify, Dropbox etc.
- Private - Visible only to your network to use within an organization or a group.
Describe the API
Once you get the API with the authentication access, you need to describe them to create a custom connector. You can specify the API parameters in the custom connector builder while creating the custom connector.
Secure the Custom Connector
You can use one of these standard authentication methods to secure your connectors.
- Basic authentication - This method allows a connection to third-party APIs by authenticating with a username and password.
- API key authentication - This method allows a connection to third-party APIs by authenticating with an API key.
- OAuth1 authentication - In OAuth1, the user grants permission to access their resources in the third-party applications without sharing their credentials. The Creator application can use an access token provided by the third-party application to access the user's resources. OAuth1 is efficient only for connecting with web-based applications.
- OAuth2 authentication - In OAuth2, the user will be redirected to the third-party API's page, where access to protected resources is granted without necessarily revealing the long-term credentials or the identity by exchanging an access token for a request token. OAuth2 consists of scopes that allow Creator applications to request specific permissions from the user and are more compatible with both web and non web-based applications.
- Bearer Token - This authentication type allows connecting to third-party APIs by authenticating with a secure bearer token.
- AWS - This authentication type allows connecting to AWS services using Signature Version 4 authentication.
Use a Custom Connector in your app
You'll need to create a connection to your API and use that connection in your app to call any operations that you've exposed in your custom connector. Click here to learn how to create connections.
Note: Connections using Custom Connectors should be invoked only using the Deluge invoke URL task, mentioning the respective action API, for any specific scenario/workflow.