Working with Connectors

A connector allows you to interact with a third-party product's functionality and data from your message flow. For example, the predefined ESB connectors allow you to connect to and interact with the APIs of services such as Twitter, Salesforce, and JIRA. This means that if you have enabled the Twitter and Google Spreadsheet connectors in your ESB instance, your message flow could receive requests containing a user's Twitter name and password, log into the user's Twitter account, get a list of the user's followers, and write that information to a Google spreadsheet.

Each connector provides a set of operations, which you call from your proxy services, sequences, and REST APIs to interact with that product. For example, the Twitter connector provides operations that call the Twitter APIs to get and send direct messages, retrieve IDs of friends and followers, update status, retweet other users' status, and more. If you want your configuration to send a direct message to a Twitter user, you could call the twitter.sendDirectMessage operation and pass in the Twitter user's ID and the direct message text.

The following topics provide more information on working with connectors:

In additon to the above methods, you can enable a connector by creating a configuration file in the <ESB_HOME>/repository/deployment/server/synapse-configs/default/imports directory with the following configurations.

Replace the value of the name property with the name of your connector, and name the configuration file {org.wso2.carbon.connector}<CONNECTOR_NAME>.xml (e.g., {org.wso2.carbon.connector}salesforce.xml).

<import xmlns="http://ws.apache.org/ns/synapse"
        name="salesforce"
        package="org.wso2.carbon.connectors"
        status="enabled"/>