WoodWing Connect - Introduction

WoodWing Connect is WoodWing's umbrella term for a bundle of integration technologies, licenses and tools. The options empower our partners and customers to create a best-of-breed solution, and helps them optimize their content creation processes.

WoodWing Connect goes beyond APIs, webhooks and plugins. It also encompasses integration options with hundreds of applications through a best-in-class Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solution, vastly extending the connectivity of our core applications, WoodWing Assets and WoodWing Studio.

What does WoodWing Connect include?

Connect includes a variety of technologies, licenses and tools, all bundled together.
Included with the bundle are the following items:

1. An account for WoodWing Connect powered by Workato, along with the WoodWing connectors for WoodWing Assets and WoodWing Studio.
2. An API License for WoodWing Assets, WoodWing Studio and the Planning API License.

Note that Studio Server 10.13 and above includes Studio Events as part of the core server. Studio Events is a critical part of the integration model for Studio Server. Support for Studio Events for Studio Server 10.10 to 10.12 is provided via a server plugin. Please contact us if you need the server plugin.

For a full list of benefits available with WoodWing Connect, see Available plans. 

WoodWing Connect powered by Workato

Workato is an Enterprise-level automation platform service provider. This is also referred to as an 'Integration platform as a Service' or 'IPaaS' system. Workato offers an out-of-the-box way to quickly and easily connect and integrate with hundreds of business applications. Through our partnership, WoodWing Connect offers access to the tools provided by Workato.

Workato has 6 very important terms that it uses to define aspects of the system. These terms include:

1. Recipes
2. Connectors
3. Triggers
4. Actions
5. Tasks
6. Jobs

Each is explained in the following sections.

1. Recipes

The Workato service provides customers the ability to build 'recipes' that connect disparate systems together. Recipes are the result of grouping together Triggers (generally from Connectors) and Actions to create a set of steps that the Workato tool uses to create connections between systems and to perform work.

This is what a recipe could look like:

2. Connectors

Recipes use ‘Connectors' to connect to various systems. System connectors like those for WoodWing’s Studio and Assets system encapsulate the APIs of the target system and provide user interface elements that help a person, who is not a developer, to create these connections. There are also generic connectors like the HTTP connector that allow a user to create connections without having a specific system connector.

In the case of WoodWing, we provide two connectors as part of WoodWing Connect: one for WoodWing Assets and one for WoodWing Studio.

3. Triggers

Every recipe must have a ‘Trigger’.

For example, a trigger could be waiting for a webhook to be sent to it. A trigger could also be a polling operation that queries the source system every x minutes to see if there is any work to do.

It’s also important to note that Triggers can have ‘conditions’. For example, an event can be sent to a recipe and the trigger can qualify the event by adding a condition such as ‘if the status equals 'New’, and then continue on with the recipe.

4. Actions

Actions are steps in the recipes after the trigger, that do the actual work. These actions include things like looping through data, creating variables, logging into another system and other items.

So, a recipe is triggered by the receipt of a webhook from the source system or by polling the source system. If the triggers conditions are met the recipe will walk through the defined actions. Certain kinds of ‘Actions’ will up the count of ‘Tasks’ within the Workato account. For example, logging into a another system will count as a ‘Task’ within Workato.

5. Tasks

Tasks are particular Actions within a recipe that act as a counter within a recipe. A recipe can be triggered by an event, process data, and then update another system. In general, logging into another system is a ‘task’. A more thorough definition can be found on the Workato site.

6. Jobs

A job is recorded whenever a recipe is triggered. Each job is unique and the job retains all the data for each run of the recipe. Jobs also keep all error information for any action within the recipe.

WoodWing Connect

FuseBox is an account, provided by WoodWing, on Amazon Web Services that can be provisioned with a variety of AWS services.

These services can be, but are not limited to, AWS Lambda, Lightsail, API Gateway, S3 storage and potentially any other service necessary to develop an integration for a customer.

Some of the AWS services available:

What defines the usage of FuseBox versus using the Workato tool to do the work of an integration are things like:

1. The volume of file data that will pass through the integration. Think image wire feeds where there is a vast amount of file data flowing from the service provider to the final endpoint such as WoodWing Assets.

2. The volume of transactions that an integration can generate. Given that our plans in Workato have ‘Task limits’ assigned, any integration that includes many, many actions to other systems could push the task limit number.

3. Technical limitations - There could be situations where 'WoodWing Connect powered by Workato' cannot meet a particular need that a customer has but which can be met by using FuseBox and the tools available.

4. User interface needs for an integration - some integrations need a UI component to allow a customer to select some values or set some metadata that will then trigger an integration. In this case we may need to have the UI hosted outside of the WoodWing Cloud environment (Example: External Plugins for WoodWing Assets). FuseBox can provide this service for the integration using S3/Cloudfront.

WoodWing licenses

As part of the purchase of WoodWing Connect, the customer is provided with an API License for WoodWing Assets and 2 licenses for WoodWing Studio: an API license and a Planning API license. Additional licenses can be purchased.