Dovetail walk through

Welcome to Dovetail, integration made easy.

Today, I will walk you through the main parts of Dovetail, your integration platform as a service.

Lets login to our demo instance where I use my business email address and password manager to log in.

We always land on the Flow Manager screen, I will explain this screen later in this video.

In the right top corner you will find your login details and the place where you can change your password or log out of the application.

In the account details, you can activate your 2 factor authentication.

When using that, we will get you the QR code to use in your Authenticator app.

Left to your user name you will find the link to our Academy, this is where you can find all general and detailed information about using the application and building your integration flows.

Dovetail can be used as a multi-tenant application.

Right below your login name you can see in which tenant you are working.

If you have access rights to multiple tenants, you can use the tenant dropdown, and switch to one of the other tenants.

On the left side in the blue bar, you can find the Flow manager. This is the place where you see all running flows.
You can access the flow details and get more information, like how healthy your flow is running.

The Flow designer is the place where you build your integration flows. On the Flows tab you can organize your flows in Groups,

in the Components tab you will find the library of components that you can use on your flow canvas. We will take a closer look at the Flow manager and Designer in a minute.

Right from the Flow designer you will find the Tenant manager. We will only show this if you have access to multiple tenants.

Depending on your rights, you can manage access for your users and manage your variables for the Test and Production environment.

Next you will find the Instance manager, this is if you have admin rights to this instance.

The Instance Manager lets you create and organize your Tenants, or switch from one tenant to the other.

All of these overview screens let you sort and filter on each header and on one or more details.

Before we take a closer look at the Flow manager and Flow designer, there is the Instance Settings screen.

This is where you can manage the variables on Instance level.

So, we have variables on Instance, Tenant and Flow level.

Let’s take a closer look at the Flow Designer.
You build your flow on the Route canvas, which is an infinite canvas with a minimap to give you an overview of where you are located on the canvas.

If, for some reason, the flow encounters an error, the Route will fall back on the Error route canvas.

The Error route by itself, is just another flow where you handle the what-if-scenario in case there is an error.

On the Settings tab you can edit the flow name, save this flow as a component, set your Transport type, set your Timeout, activate the Trace function in a certain timeframe and organize your Flow variables for Test and Production.

The last tab on Flow level is the Notes tab.

This is where you can store notes that describe whatever you want to leave behind for others.

Together with the notes on component level in the flow, these notes will act as your functional and technical documentation.

Let’s go back to the Flow route canvas and create a new flow to talk about the basics of creating a flow.

The easiest concept consists of two endpoints with something happening in between. For example an inbound http call that receives XML data and that we want to store on Google drive in CSV format.

First we create a new flow, give it a name and place it in a Group. We switch to the Components tab and search for or pick the "Inbound http component" and drag it to the canvas.

The other endpoint is the "Google outbound component" to store the result on Google drive. As you can see, the Components are red, that is because they need more configuration. By clicking the Validation tab, we will give you some help.

If you double click on the "HTTP component" you can set everything that is needed.

All components are 'opinionated' what means that we already have set a lot of defaults to minimize your effort to get things going.

To skip some time to explain, I will now show you the completed setup.

The "Inbound http component" acts like your Dovetail API.

If you connect to this endpoint, the flow will kick-off.

In this demo we will use Postman to post an example XML file and kick off this flow.

Next, we convert the XML to CSV, using the "XMLtoCSV component".
We use the "set header component" to give a name to the result file.
The last step in this demo is to place the file on my Google drive.

Lets see what happens if we kick it off using Postman.
This URL matches the Dovetail API in the "Inbound http component" and my XML file is in the body.
As you can see the result on Google drive is there.

If we take a closer look at the results in the flow manager you will find each step in the transaction log.

On the transactions tab we can see what has been processed from each component to the next.

When you click on transaction, we will show you each step with the data that came in.

This equals the result of the processing done in the previous component.

If you need to adjust something you can switch to the Flow designer from here using the “open in designer” button.

Last but not least, if you want to learn more, I strongly suggest you take a closer look at our Academy.

I will leave the URL in the description. https://academy.dovetail.world/

To get your own demo environment go to our website integrationmadeeasy.com and hit the orange Try it yourself button in the top right corner.

Enjoy!