Creating your First Recipe

Recipes are a set of steps that GoCanvas Integrations will follow to automate work between your cloud and on-premise softwares.

Recipes

Recipes have many advanced features, allowing them to handle all app integration and business automation scenarios, including complex data transformations, conditional triggers and actions, duplicate detection, and much more.

While complex recipes can be created, we can get our first recipe up and running in 5 minutes. The building blocks of Recipes break down into Apps, Triggers, and Actions.

First, select the Project that you want the recipe to be within or Create a Project, the instructions for this are detailed in the Getting Started with GoCanvas Integrations article. Then, select Create in the upper right corner of the page and select Recipe from the drop down menu.

The Name of the recipe can be simple, i.e. the apps that are connected within the Recipe, or as complex as what the Recipe accomplishes. Be sure to use a naming convention that works for your team. 

The Location is a Project or Folder for this recipe to be organized into. We created a Project and Folder for Connections in the article “Getting Started with GoCanvas Integrations.” You can use these existing Assets or create new ones.

There are a variety of different starting points from which a Recipe can be triggered:

• Trigger from an app,
• Run on a schedule,
• Trigger from a webhook,
• Manage other recipes,
• Build recipe function,
• Build an API endpoint,
• Build a Slack bot command.

For this first example, we will use Trigger from an app.

1. Once you have a Name, Location, and a starting point, select Start building.

2. Now in the Recipe Editor, we first want to select the App for our Trigger. In the example of sending submission data to a Google Sheet, the App that triggers the Recipe is GoCanvas.

   

3. Here is where you can select the apps that you have already connected with or search for another app to connect with. Once you select an App to connect to, you will see a list of available Triggers. In this example, the Trigger is “New submission.”

4. The next step is to choose the Connection, whether you have established a Connection to the GoCanvas account you wish to use or not, you can do either from this screen.

   

5. With the Connection set, there are several settings that are required in the Setup stage. This step may contain some required details from the Trigger, or you can also set conditions for your trigger. For this example, GoCanvas asks if the form is in a department, whether the submission that triggers the recipe comes from “All Forms” or a specific form, whether this is triggered mid workflow, and if there are certain conditions under which the Trigger will be processed.
6. With the Trigger selected, we can begin working on the Actions that occur when this event is triggered. Select either of the + buttons that appear below our Trigger in the Recipe Editor.

7. There are seven Actions that we could take:

   • Action in an app,
   • IF condition,
   • IF/ELSE condition,
   • Repeat action,
   • Call function,
   • Stop job,
   • Handle errors.
8. For this example, select Action in an App.

9. Now, we will do a very similar process to setting up the Action that we did with the Trigger. Select the App we want to work with, and then select what type of action we want to take. For this example, Add row is the most applicable.

   

10. Next, select the Connection if it’s already established or add a new Connection. On the setup page, we need to tell the integration information about where the data is being sent. In this example, a Google Sheet was created that included a header row with field names from the form and one row of data. This setup is required for the Recipe to know how to organize the data that it is sending.

    

11. In this example, we are adding rows of data from a submission to a Google Sheet. Using the Recipe Data window, we can drag and drop various data points into fields available on the action. In this example, the columns in the Google Sheet were labeled the same as the form field names so that field mapping would be as simple as possible.
12. When you are ready, Save up in the top right and then Test in the upper right corner. In your first app, perform an event that will trigger the Recipe, which is making a new submission in GoCanvas for this example. The Test Jobs page will show us the results of the Test.
13. Now we can exit the Recipe Editor. Back on the previous screen, we will now have a green Start Recipe button up in the top right corner. You are now up and running with your very first GoCanvas Integrations recipe!