Environment Variables are configured through the Frends UI and securely stored in the database.
Environment Variables are optional static configuration information that is associated with a particular environment. These Variables are most commonly used to store integration process related information such as passwords and usernames of the systems that are being connected into.
You can create Environment Variables in different categories to help organize similar Variables together.
Key-Value pairs, for storing simple information such as connection strings.
Hierarchical Groups, for storing all the information relating to a specific object such as ERP password, username and server location.
Lists, for storing repetitive information such as the IP addresses of your client servers.
For instance, you can use these lists directly in Foreach loops to iterate over them.
There are no limitations in what you can store in an Environment Variable.
Storing Information
The main advantage in using Environment Variables is that after configuring them you can simply refer back to an Environment Variable in your Process to access the configured value and if you need to change that value you can update it on the fly in the Environment Variables page.
Environment Specific Information
The other benefit of using Environment Variables is that you can configure them to be Environment specific. This means that you can use a different password, or even a different server, for an integration process in the test Environment than you do in the Production environment. This allows for seamless development, testing and production life-cycle because the configuration of each Environment is tied to an appropriate Environment Variable.
Environment Variables in a nutshell
You only need to keep track of these variables in a single place.
If a variable changes you only need to update it once.
You can securely store sensitive information such as passwords as environment variables, using the
secretvariable type.You can have different Variables for different Environments.
Example
Following image shows the Environment Variable Foo, that has the value bar in a Development Environment and foobar in Test Environment. It is possible to these values in processes by using the reference #env.Foo
