What are Integrations?

Integrations allow you to connect your IVA to external services to perform dynamic operations like fetching data, posting data, or performing some business logic over the collected entities from the IVA.

Types of Integrations

Haptik's Conversation Studio tool supports two types of integrations. They are

1. Integrations via Code Step using Code Editor
2. Integrations via Static Step using Integrations Tab

Integrations via Code step using Code Editor

Code Step provides an option of Code Editor where you can write your custom python code to communicate with the external service and execute the business logic.

Code Step is a type of step which contains all the business logic to integrate a function. To know more about Code Step please read here.

Code Editor is a feature using which we can write our Python code and integration functions. The supported programming language is Python 3 and above. If any syntax errors or exceptions are raised by the main function, this will result in a Bot Break message.

Stages to add your APIs -

• Initialize variables to use the collected information in entities
• Pass the information to the API
• Fetch the values back from API
• Log the details using logger package
• Change the final_response
• Run the code
• Provide Sample Output
• Create an Output Step to display the output on the bot

Integrations via Static Step using Integrations Tab

Static Step provides an option for integrations. In this mode of integration, you provide an API URL to which the entity data will be passed as a POST request with a JSON payload. The API URL is then expected to return the bot response in a JSON format.

Choosing the type of Integration

It is important to choose the right type of integration for your use case as this will increase the speed of shipping the IVA and also help in long-term maintainability.

When to use Code Steps?

In most cases, you should be using Code Step's Code Editor. Here are some sample scenarios:

• Integrating with APIs from external providers where they have their own request and response formats
• Performing business logic validations or calculations on the collected entities
• Posting or fetching data from external data stores or services
• OTP verification

You can read more about the Code Editor Integration here.

When to use Static step integrations?

This should only be used in very complex cases where a middleware service needs to be built or the code is too complicated. Some scenarios where you should be using the API integrations are:

• Having Custom authentication and data storage requirements
• Integrating with APIs from external providers where they understand Haptik's request and response formats

You can read more about it here.