Terminology Used
• ThingWorx Flow Connectors—Specialized NPM package that contains various artifacts required to interact with a connected system.
• Connector Project—Corresponds to a connector of a system that logically groups certain integration functionality together.
• Workflow—Connection between two or more web applications or connectors.
Creating a workflow means defining the steps of a recurring task that you want to automate. For example, whenever a New Lead is created in Salesforce, create a New Task in Google Tasks.
• Action—Specifies the tasks that you want the workflow to perform.
For example, for a workflow that involves creation of a new task in the Google Task connector whenever a new lead is created in the Salesforce, Creation of a New Task in Google Task is an action. A workflow can have several actions. Each service has several actions that you can use. For example, Google Task has actions like Create New Task List, Create New task, Get Task Details, Update Task, and so on.
• Authorization—Process of granting ThingWorx Flow the permission to perform certain tasks in the third-party connectors. For example, if you use an action related to Google Mail in your workflow, you need to first login to your Google mail account, and then authorize ThingWorx Flow to perform certain tasks on your behalf.
• Lookup—A read only field that fetches a list of your resources from external applications, based on the authorization selected.
• Trigger—An event that initiates a workflow. For example, for a workflow that involves creation of a new lead in the Salesforce connector, whenever a new task is created in the GoogleTask connector; creation of a new lead in Salesforce is the trigger. A workflow can have only one trigger.
• ThingWorx Flow CLI—To create and test various artifacts such as Actions, Lookups, OAuth, and Triggers of the connectors. PTC recommends using ThingWorx Flow CLI to perform these actions.