Integrations

Frends is an integration platform, after all.

Processes, Frends term for integrations, offer a straightforward way to connect your various systems and applications, ensuring everything works together seamlessly. By automating tasks and orchestrating workflows, Processes help streamline operations, reduce manual workload, and minimize the chance of errors—boosting the productivity of your team.

The Frends platform provides an intuitive setup, making it accessible even if you're not a coding pro. Its flexible framework supports a wide range of integration needs, whether you're dealing with on-premises systems, cloud-based applications, or a combination of both in a hybrid deployment. With Frends, adapting to changes and staying responsive to business demands is much more manageable, keeping you well-prepared for future challenges.

Low-code Development

Frends uses BPMN 2.0 notation to define APIs, integrate systems, and automate processes. Frends provides enhancements to the notation with Handlebars-enabled C# programming, making it possible to create most anything that is visually pleasing, easy for non-programmers to read and understand, and requiring only minimal programming by the developer.

Process Editor uses BPMN 2.0 and C# to create integration flows.

Learn more about how Frends works for low-code development here.

Connectors

In Frends, we have Tasks instead of what is more commonly known as connectors, that perform actions towards other systems. Each Process also requires a starting condition or event listener to start, which is done using Triggers in Frends.

HTTP Task is used to make HTTP requests to APIs to send or query data.

Learn more about Frends Tasks and Triggers here.

Shared State Storage

Shared State Storage provides a temporary caching mechanism for data that needs to persist across Process executions or be shared between different Processes. Instead of setting up a dedicated database or external storage, you can use Shared State to maintain information like authentication tokens, counters, or temporary configuration data.

Shared State works as a key-value store where each entry lives for a specific duration before being automatically cleaned up. You define how long data should remain available by setting a Time To Live (TTL) ranging from one minute to 30 days. Once the TTL expires, the system removes the data automatically.

The data itself is stored in the Agent Group's database as JSON-serializable values. This means you can store simple strings and numbers, but also complex objects and arrays, as long as they can be represented in JSON format.

Read more about Share State Storage in Frends.

Long Running Processes

If you need the same Process to continue with some user interaction or long wait times between steps, it makes sense to have the Process wait for continuation instead of splitting it into separate Processes that have no common data shared between them. Long-running Processes are there for that purpose specifically.

Long Running Process can present a whole business process at once.

Head on over to Long Running Processes page to learn more.

Reusable Content

In order to keep up with DRY principle (Don't Repeat Yourself), Frends includes Subprocesses and Environment Variables to allow defining functionality and values once and reusing them in your Processes.

Check out the Reusable Content page for more information.

Templates

Frends Templates are pre-built structures designed to expedite workflow creation and integration processes. They serve as a blueprint that aids in maintaining consistency and minimizing potential errors. By utilizing these Templates, users can save significant time in setting up new integrations, as they provide a reliable and tested starting point tailored for various common tasks.

Templates give a starting point for development for the most common use cases.

Head over to Templates page to learn more.