Note: When I began writing this article, I did not anticipate its length. To help navigate through the content, I have included a table of contents. Moving forward, I am committed to keeping the next articles in the series more concise. However, it was important to delve deeply into this topic as it covers the fundamentals of Sitecore Connect.
- What is Sitecore Connect
- Sitecore Connect Main Building Blocks
- Sitecore Connect Main Building Blocks – Projects
- Sitecore Connect Main Building Blocks – Connections
- Sitecore Connect Main Building Blocks – Recipes
- Conclusion and afterthoughts
What is Sitecore Connect
Sitecore Connect is a low-code/no-code integration platform that lets businesses easily connect their Sitecore digital experience platform with other third-party systems. It offers pre-built connectors, APIs, and tools that allow technical and non-technical users to collaborate on integration projects, resulting in faster time to market, lower costs, and increased innovation. Sitecore Connect is powered by Workato’s iPaaS platform, which provides a drag-and-drop interface builder, code editor, testing tools, and a wide range of pre-built connectors, APIs, and other development tools to simplify the integration process. Workato’s custom connector SDK enables businesses to create their own connectors, and Sitecore Connect’s low-code/no-code approach to integration reduces the risk of errors and delays that can come with traditional development processes. Overall, Sitecore Connect and Workato provide a more accessible, efficient, and collaborative way to integrate Sitecore with other systems, helping businesses stay ahead in today’s digital landscape.
All that said let’s look inside the Sitecore Connect building blocks in more detail.
Sitecore Connect Main Building Blocks
When you open your Sitecore Connect and navigate to your project tab you are presented with the following sidebar which hosts the main building blocks:
Now let’s dive deeper into the three main building blocks of Sitecore Connect: Projects, Connections, and Recipes.
Sitecore Connect Main Building Blocks – Projects
Overview
In Sitecore Connect, a project refers to a collection of related connections and recipes that work together to achieve a specific integration goal. A project typically represents a business process or workflow that requires the exchange of data or functionality between Sitecore and other systems. For example, a project might involve integrating Sitecore with a CRM system to automatically update customer data in both systems, or with a marketing automation tool to trigger personalized campaigns based on website behavior.
A project in Sitecore Connect is created by assembling a series of connections and recipes, which are the basic building blocks of integrations. Projects in Sitecore Connect can be easily configured and managed through a user-friendly interface, which allows users to monitor the status of their integrations, troubleshoot issues, and make changes as needed. This approach simplifies the process of integrating Sitecore with other systems, enabling businesses to more quickly and easily unlock the full potential of their digital experience platform.
Creating Projects
To create a new project, you can either click on the “Create a new Project” button or the plus (“+”) sign located next to the project name.
Clicking on the button brings up a simple UI that enables us to name our project and provide a description for it.
Once the project is created, it will appear in the project sidebar, giving users the ability to easily navigate and explore it.
As you can see, the project is currently empty and does not contain any resources. On its own, a project does not accomplish much, as we previously mentioned,Projects serve as a means to organize and create collections of Connections and Recipes, which are the actual building blocks of integration. With that said, let us explore how to build connections.
Sitecore Connect Main Building Blocks – Connections
Overview
In Sitecore Connect, a connection is a pre-built integration point that enables businesses to connect their Sitecore digital experience platform with other third-party systems, such as CRMs, ERPs, or marketing automation tools.
Each connection in Sitecore Connect is designed to work with a specific system or service, and provides a set of pre-built functionalities that allow data to be exchanged between the two systems. For example, a connection with a CRM system might enable Sitecore to automatically create or update contact records in the CRM based on user interactions on the website, or retrieve information about a specific contact from the CRM to personalize the content displayed on the website.
Creating Connections
To create a connection, let’s navigate to our “Sitecore For Beginners” project and click on the “Create” button. From the dropdown menu, select “Connection”.
Upon reaching the New Connection page, you’ll be presented with a wide range of pre-existing Sitecore Connect Recommended Apps that you can effortlessly connect to. Sitecore Connect offers a continuously growing collection of pre-built connections that can be easily customized and tailored to meet your unique business needs.
As of writing this blog post, Sitecore Connect provides pre-built connections for several Sitecore Composable DXP solutions, such as CDP, Content Hub, Content Hub One, OrderCloud, and Send, with new ones continuously added to the library.
To create a CDP connection, simply provide the following information:
- Connection Name – This is the name that will appear when the connection is used (Let’s name our connection “Sitecore for Beginners CDP Connection”).
- Location – This refers to the project where the connection will be saved. You can use the existing “Sitecore Connect For Beginners” project that we created in the previous step.
- AWS Region – This is the region where your CDP tenant is hosted. You can obtain this information from your CDP or you may already know it.
- Client Key – This is the CDP client key.
- Client Secret – This is the CDP client secret.
Once you have filled in all of these pieces of information, simply click the connect button to create your CDP connection.
Once all the values have been entered correctly and the connection has been successfully established, a screen similar to this one will appear. It will confirm that the connection has been successfully connected and provide some information about it.
Upon navigating back to the Project tab, we can observe that it is no longer empty and our newly created connection now resides there.
This means that the connection is now associated with this project and can be utilized by any Recipes within it. However, the connection currently displays “Used in 0 Recipes,” so let’s see how we can create some recipes that will utilize this connection.
Sitecore Connect Main Building Blocks – Recipes
Overview
Recipes in Sitecore Connect are a way of defining how data flows between your different systems and applications. They allow you to specify the exact transformations and mappings that need to occur to move data between systems. A Recipe consists of a series of steps that define the source and destination data, as well as any transformations or mappings that need to occur along the way.
Recipes can be used to accomplish a wide variety of data integration tasks, including syncing customer data between different systems, importing data from external sources, or exporting data from Sitecore to external systems. Recipes can be customized to meet your specific business needs and can be used across multiple projects and connections.
Once you have created a Recipe, it can be executed manually or triggered automatically based on a schedule or specific events. Recipes can also be monitored to ensure that they are running properly and to troubleshoot any issues that arise during data integration.
Creating Recipes
Compared to Projects and Connections, Recipes are a bit more complex to create. However, let’s start with the basics by navigating to our “Sitecore For Beginners” project and creating a new Recipe.
Upon selecting create a new recipe, we’ll be directed to the Recipe Setup screen
When creating a new recipe, in addition to providing a name and location, we are presented with options for the starting point or trigger of the recipe. Let’s explore what these different options are:
Recipe Triggers
Trigger from an app
Some of the connectors for Sitecore Connect come with pre-built triggers that can be used for starting a recipe. Most of these scenarios are existing webhook triggers inside the integrated application itself. This option allows us to selected a trigger from the ones exposed in the connector itself – a good example is Sitecore Send which have a trigger when a new subscription/unsubscription happens (we will use that trigger in some of the next posts of the series)
Run on a scheldue
The CRON trigger is a classic option that allows the recipe to run on a specific schedule. This is particularly useful for performing tasks such as nightly imports or exports or for building integrations that do not require real-time or continuous data transfer. With CRON, you can set a specific date and time for the recipe to run, as well as define the frequency and duration of its execution. This can be a valuable tool for automating certain processes and reducing manual effort.
Trigger from a webhook
The Trigger from a webhook option is one of the most powerful options available in Sitecore Connect. Workato can expose its own webhooks that can be triggered by any third-party application. Moreover, it comes with a guided setup that automatically helps build a data model based on the webhook payload, which can then be used downstream. In upcoming posts, we will delve deeper into webhooks, so we won’t go into too much detail about them in this article.
Manage other recipes
The trigger based on events related to another recipe is an excellent option for chaining recipes or handling events in case of issues. With this option, you can set up a recipe to trigger automatically when another recipe completes successfully or fails to complete. This can be useful for building complex workflows that require multiple steps or for creating fallback scenarios in case of errors.
For example, suppose you have a recipe that retrieves data from an external system and stores it in a database. You can set up a second recipe that triggers automatically when the first recipe completes successfully. This second recipe can then use the data stored in the database and perform additional actions, such as sending an email or updating a record in another system.
On the other hand, if the first recipe fails to complete, you can set up a third recipe to trigger automatically and handle the error. This third recipe can perform actions such as logging the error, sending an alert, or retrying the failed recipe.
Build a recipe function
Recipe functions in Workato are an incredibly powerful extensibility model that allows users to build reusable logic and bundle it into a function that can be called from other recipes. This makes it easy to separate out specific pieces of logic and use them across multiple recipes, without having to rewrite or copy and paste the workflow each time. This not only saves time, but also makes it easier to maintain and update recipes.
Using recipe functions is simple: just call the function from within a recipe, passing in any required inputs as arguments. The function will execute and return the result, which can then be used in the rest of the recipe. This allows for a modular and scalable approach to building integrations, making it easier to manage complex workflows and streamline data processing.
Build an API Endpoint
API Recipes in Workato are a way to build and expose custom APIs that can be used by other applications or services. With API Recipes, we can take any recipe we’ve built in Workato and expose it via an API endpoint, making it easy for other systems to integrate with it. This is a powerful feature that allows us to extend the functionality of Workato beyond its pre-built connectors, and integrate with any system that has an API. By building API Recipes, we can also control the data that is exposed through the API, and limit access to sensitive information. Overall, API Recipes provide a flexible and customizable way to integrate with external systems and build powerful integrations.
Build a Slack bot command
Workbot for Slack is a chatbot offered by Workato that provides users with the ability to monitor and interact with their business applications without leaving the Slack platform. With Workbot, teams can set up notifications to be posted to specific Slack channels whenever important events occur.
This trigger is based on when the command is recieved from the Slack workbot. A very cool integration points for organizations that use Slack for automation.
Recipe Actions
There are many triggers available in Sitecore Connect, each with its own specific use case. While we’ll explore some of them in future articles of this series, for now, let’s keep it simple and select “Run on a schedule” to take a closer look at the actions of a recipe.
Action in an app
An action in one of the connected applications. It executes an action allowed by the connector for the application you tried to integrate. The real power of Sitecore Connect.
IF condition
Standard IF condition from programming – execute the next actions only if a condition is true
IF/ELSE condition
Similar to the IF condition, but with added ELSE clause in case the logic is more complex and something needs to be executed if things don’t go according to plan
Repeat action
Equivalent to foreach in development. Itterates over a list of inputs and executes action for each item of the list (or the batch)
Call Function
Remember when we talked about recipe functions earlier ? Well this is the way to invoke them from a recipe. Basically a way to call a reusable subfunction.
Stop Job
Exit condition if the things don’t go the way we want them to
Handle errors
The equivalent of Try/Catch block in programming. Tries to execute an action and if it fails goes to the error block so you can handle it and rollback or log the error.
Conclusion and afterthoughts
Great! We have now covered the main building blocks that we will use in the upcoming articles. Although we won’t be building a complete recipe at this time, this is precisely why I have chosen to make this a series. We’ll continue to delve into Sitecore Connect’s features and explore how to create efficient and powerful integrations in the future articles.
If you are interested in doing some reading on your own I can recommend the following articles:
- Workato documentation: https://docs.workato.com/getting-started.html
- Sitecore Connect documentation: https://doc.sitecore.com/connect/en/users/sitecore-connect/index-en.html
- Some excellent series by Christian Hanh on building complex integrations for XM Cloud by using Sitecore Connect: https://hachweb.wordpress.com/tag/xm-cloud/
Thanks for sticking here and see you in the next article !
Sitecore Corner 
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