Kinetic Data – Plugins

Video Transcript

Hello, my name is Rodney Holmes and I’m here to talk to you about plugins. The Kinetic platform can use plugins to connect it to just about any system.

Our platform comes ready to play with several pre built bridges, handlers and sources, which you can use to perform the common CRUD operations create, read, update, and delete.

Bridges are a plugin used to get more data from source systems. A source system might be a SQL database, or a software as a service system with a RESTful API. If it connects to the internet, a bridge adapter can be written to connect it with the kinetic platform. file stores allow Platform Developers to fetch files from other source systems, much in the same way bridges do handlers and Agent handlers are snippets of Ruby code that are executed by a workflow or an agent.

Handlers can be written to execute any or all of the CRUD operations we mentioned before enabling platform developers to do just about anything they can dream of with data from other source systems.

If you’re looking to accomplish a task in a different system with an API endpoint built for that use case, then the kinetic platform can be used to automate that process. Sources enabled workflows to anticipate and parse through the structure of incoming data, providing your form developers with a standardized input of data when using that source.

Now let’s dive into bridges and handlers a little bit more. Bridges are the platform’s mechanism for connecting source system data to forms to both work with and display that data.

Bridges usually provide read only access into another system by containing the code for accessing and querying the system and then formatting the response. One of the big benefits to using bridges is that form builders just need to know what bridge to use, and the data that bridge will provide nothing more. handlers are snippets of code that perform certain actions within workflows.

They can be used to execute crud actions to any system, as well as construct loops, output values, and transform data. These, along with the connecting logic make up the body of most workflows.

Workflow developers work extensively with handlers, and the experienced developers often learn to create their own handlers to tweak the actions and outcomes of existing ones. Once a new handler is created, it will need to be loaded and configured. This is done in the handlers tab.

Inside the Plugins menu at the space level, you will need to import the handler in a dot zip file format. Once imported, you will usually need to define where the handler points any connection or authentication credentials that requires and any other fields specific to your handler.

Then you can use your new handler and any number of workflow trees and routines, just like you would use the predefined nodes.

With bridges and handlers, you can create incredibly flexible and powerful workflows that rely on data external to the kinetic platform. And with a little extra effort. You can be in the driver’s seat of how that data is requested, formatted and ultimately used within your kinetic application.