Design
Navigating, building and activating an automation is real simple. Everything you need to build and manage your automations is placed in the toolbar below.
This makes it easy to switch between options without leaving your primary build page
Here are some basic features you need while building out your automation:
- Call API: This is the all important option that adds a new API task to your automation. Add this to add an API call
- If Condition: Add true/false conditions to a task and add Call API for individual condition
- Loop: Yes, we offer looping out of the box and allow you to loop through a list
- Send a response
See a quick video that shows how you can built your automation with APIs. The video covers 2 different use cases and implementation types (all in under 7 minutes).
Create a new automation or edit an existing one easily.
- Click on Design from the toolbar and select Create New
- You can also edit your existing automation by clicking the edit icon from the Design popup or from your Automation home page
The first step is to set the Trigger (i.e. how will the automation be initiated), this is done by the Properties window of the first task.
- Select the first task and click on the Properties tab
- Name your automation, the trigger will always be an Endpoint
- Click on the Schedule dropdown and choose how you would like to trigger this automation:
- Manual: if you would like to call the endpoint from your end or use webhooks, choose this option
- Time: scheduled run
- If you have a sample JSON payload, you can enter it under the Call data section (note: this allows you to pick a response in the following tasks)
- Add a Description if you'd like (for internal purpose only)
- Click on the Endpoint to get the endpoint for your automation
Add an API to make the API call through Add Action.
- Click on Call API (or the + icon) to add a new API task to your automation
- Add a Title and click on Select API
- On Select API, search for the API (if you don't see the one you want, you can simply add it yourself with API Setup)
- On selecting the API, you will need to choose the Connection to use (if there are no Connections, click on Add Connection and authorise a new Connection)
- Complete the requested information for the API
- You can now proceed to add multiple tasks by clicking on the + icon or the Call API button
Each API task added has optional advanced settings that allow you to:
- Add a delay between your calls (this is especially useful if the provider API you are accessing has an API limiting in place)
- Run synchronously allows you to wait for the API call to finish (wait for a response from the provider) before moving on to the next API). By default this is set to Auto which automatically either waits for a response or moves on to the next API based on which API response is consumed.
Pathfix Automation allows you to use the data received from all your previous API calls in the current API call. This means, you can use this data in your next API call.
See example below, which shows how you can add the Xero customer data received in your Slack notification you send to your customer:
Once you have built your automation and added the APIs you want to connect, click on the Test and enable tab to run a test against all your API calls in the automation before you can Enable it. This is a mandatory step.
The entire automation will execute:
After testing has been completed, you can enable your automation by clicking the radio button. Please note, you will not be able to publish an automation without running the test automation first.
Need help? You can always reach out to our support team for any additional assistance at support@pathfix.com.