Key concepts

Before diving into use cases, here are the basic concepts you’ll encounter:

• Project: Organize your automations into projects for easier management and collaboration. Each Project can contain multiple recipes (workflows).

• Recipe: A recipe is an automated workflow that executes a series of steps to integrate and process data across multiple applications. For example, “When a case is approved in Dotfile, create a record in Salesforce and send a message to Slack.” Recipes are built with a simple no-code designer interface and can connect multiple apps.

• Connections: Secure authorizations that let recipes access your apps (e.g., Dotfile, Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot). Connections are reusable and managed centrally within Integration Studio.

• Trigger : Each recipe starts with a trigger—the event that initiates the workflow. Triggers can be:
  • Polling: Regularly checks for new data or changes.
  • Real-time: Responds instantly to events (often via webhooks).
  • Scheduled: Runs at specific times or intervals.
  • Change Data Capture (CDC): Detects and acts on database changes.

• Steps and actions: A recipe executes steps each time a trigger event occurs. Every recipe requires at least one step. The simplest step is an action, such as fetching results from webhooks, fetching company data, creating an individual, sending a Slack message, updating a HubSpot contact, etc.

• Jobs: A job represents the flow of a trigger event through the recipe. Each time a trigger event occurs, the recipe executes its actions. Jobs succeed when all actions execute successfully. If an error occurs, subsequent actions do not run unless error handling is configured.

• Tasks: Each action executed by a recipe counts as a task. Task usage is tracked and can be monitored in your dashboard.

📖 Learn more: Recipes documentation.