Connector SDK

Our SDK documentation provides detailed instructions for creating customized connectors that seamlessly integrate with applications not directly supported by Workato's pre-built connectors. Building a high-quality connector on the Workato platform requires managing technical aspects of connector development as well as focusing on the user experience of your connector.

Workato was built with the philosophy that anyone can do enterprise-level integrations without any coding involved. As such, connectors on the platform should aim to balance functionality with ease of use. Whether you're developing a connector for your own team's use or you're a third-party developer looking to list your connector on Workato, reading this documentation is useful in getting you started on your journey.

What is a custom connector?

A connector enables Workato to engage with a single application through a sequence of triggers and actions. Triggers actively monitor events within the target application and initiate a series of actions known as recipes. Actions carry out specific pre-defined operations in the target application.

Connectors built on the SDK are called custom connectors. These connectors have a private scope by default. This means they are only visible and available to the connector owner. After the connector is built and ready, you can share it with other users on various levels.

Before we begin...

Workato has a whole host of other features and functionalities that might help you achieve what you are hoping for such as our universal HTTP connector or custom actions if your integration needs aren't so complex. Learn more.

If you've decided that a custom connector is necessary, you can search the community library (opens new window) to see if anyone has contributed a custom connector to the application you're looking for. Our support team on our main website (opens new window) can also help you check our internal repository of custom connectors over chat.

Reading the SDK documentation is still useful as you'll be able to install these custom connectors and continue working on them if you wish to do so.

Documentation format

This section describes everything you need to know about our SDK as well as provides some guides, walkthroughs, and example connectors created by Workato users. While you can use the following links to navigate directly to specific sections, we recommend following the sequential order of this documentation. This approach ensures you don't overlook any features that can help you build connectors.

In our documentation, we default to JSON when giving examples. It is highly recommended that you read about how other data formats can be handled if the API you plan to connect to uses a different data format.