888-685-3101, ext. 2

Workato Recipes Using Best Practices

by | Oct 29, 2024 | Blog, Enterprise Information Management

Workato Recipes Using Best Practices

Introduction

Workato is an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) Tool. It is a suite of cloud services allowing the development, execution, and governance of integration flows connecting on-premise and cloud-based processes, services, and applications. It is the best integration platform for acute automation, giving a better customer experience, enterprise integration, and process automation.

Workato enables the integrating of more than 200 business applications, including Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceDesk, Jira, HipChat, and Confluence. Its secure integration services also handle multi-step workflows and conditional actions. Customers can get all of this without any scripts and in days or hours, unlike other integrations, which take months. To design efficient Workato Recipes that work flawlessly and reduce human errors, one should follow the best practices while planning, organizing, maintaining, and using these recipes. 

Best Practices

  1. Designing Workato Recipes
  2. Organizing Workato Recipes
  3. Workato Recipe Security
  4. Workato Recipe Performance and Scalability

Designing Workato Recipes

  • Understanding Requirements:  One needs to understand the existing manual processes before automating them. In this process, we’ve to consider what tasks to automate, what business rules need to be followed, what type and format of incoming/outgoing data to be processed, Which apps are required to be included in the automation process, and what kind of errors and exceptions and their management.  After collecting all the required information, it is easy to plan and execute it.
  • Select Right Trigger Type: Different triggers/events, namely real-time, polled, batch, and scheduled, can be used in Workato Recipes. Choose the right trigger type based on the time frame to respond. For Example, one can use a planned trigger to run a data backup.
  • Control Trigger Events:  Trigger events can be controlled by filtering the source or conditional-based data. Depending on the business needs, one can use either of the options to trigger the events.
  • Idempotence: Duplicate data may be generated if care has not been taken while designing a Workato Recipe. This duplicate data or records leads to loss of data integrity and poor data quality. For example, while creating a record in the database, the Upsert action can be used instead of Create to avoid duplicate records/data. The Upsert action updates the record if the record already exists. Otherwise, it will create a new record in the database.
  • Abstain from Infinite loops: Infinite loops can occur in event-driven recipes if there are errors in the recipe design. It can happen when two recipes trigger one another or if a recipe triggers itself continuously. One can avoid infinite loops with the help of trigger filters.
  • Reusability: To maintain consistent user experience and maximum efficiency, one can use callable recipes/recipe functions instead of doing the same recipe repeatedly with minimal modifications. Callable Recipes work within the same Workato workspace. By externalizing these recipes, one can use them across multiple workspaces. The reusability of recipe functions improves productivity, less maintenance costs, and more readable automations.
  • Error Handling:  Errors and exceptions can be handled using the Workato ‘monitoring block’ feature.  It checks for errors in a set of actions and informs what to do if errors occur. Using the Monitor-OnError block in Recipes is a good practice to handle errors and exceptions beautifully.

 Organizing Workato Recipes

  • Ensure Naming Conventions: Generally, we must follow naming conventions, like the first is a functional area, and the resource name follows the subsequent API versioning. An example of a naming convention in the Recipe is as follows.

OMS – API-1.0.0 – CreateOrder

(Functional Area)  – API Version – Resource description

  • Organize Recipes based on Resource and Functionality:  Workato recipes should be organized based on functionality and resources. This helps everyone clearly understand the purpose of each designed API. For example, if order management-related recipes are grouped in a place, it is easy for any resource to identify them faster.
  • API Versioning: For systematic management of Workato recipes, an organization must have a versioning system. It helps communicate the changes made to the latest version of the APIs to Workato developers.

Workato Recipe Security

  • API Tokens Security: API token grants access to the functionality to the one who possesses it. It should be treated like a password. It is best practice to distribute the token through the secured channel to the intended client through a secure messaging system/document.
  • Refresh mechanism to API Tokens: Refreshing API tokens frequently ensures that there should not be any threat to Workato Recipes access. It is as good as password expiration. Otherwise, distribute a JWT token with a limited lifetime expiration time. 
  • IP Whitelisting: Adding IP addresses to the allowed list controls the originating IPs that are allowed to have API access. It is part of the client’s Access Profile. It is best practice to have an allowed list, but, in a few cases, it may not be possible for some clients, namely clients who may not have a fixed IP address or clients who may connect from multiple IP addresses. Adding IP addresses to the allowed list may be impossible in these cases.
  • API Token is not the same for multiple Clients: One API token for one client enables monitoring requests in the API dashboard on a per-client basis. If numerous people have the same API token, there’s no genuine way to find who calls your API.
  • Handling Sensitive Data: Workato strongly suggests avoiding placing sensitive data as plain text within the steps of a recipe while authoring. This should be considered when applying tokens or keys for authentication to remote services and personal information. One of the best ways to secure sensitive data is by using a data pill from a previous step to the current step in a recipe.

Workato Recipe Performance and Scalability

  • API Caching: The API caching mechanism can be used when data doesn’t change frequently, giving optimum performance. It also decreases traffic between applications and provides faster responses for the given recipes.
  • Set Limit to API Calls: It is a good practice to use API policies like setting rate limits to avoid clients overconsuming APIs. This is useful for legacy backend systems that cannot handle large volumes of requests.

Conclusion

The practices mentioned above are the best to follow for Workato Recipes, and they should be organized based on the design phase, organization, performance, security, and so on for optimum performance and resource utilization. Workato tool serves different market segments, from big enterprises to mid-market companies. Workato combines integration and automation within a box by adding AI capabilities. It targets establishing itself as an “enterprise automation” category.  

For any questions, please contact us.