Embedded Workflow Builder Actions

Workflow builder products are becoming increasingly popular, enabling their users to customize and build automations that are useful for their bespoke use cases. The only limitation with these products? The number and types of steps the workflow builders provide.

If you are building workflow orchestration/automation features into your product, Paragon will enable your team to easily scale the number of 3rd-party integrated steps/actions your product can support.

Our team put together a sample workflow builder application as an illustration of the type of steps and actions you can add to your workflow builder product with Paragon’s ActionKit.

Actions powered by ActionKit

Paragon provides 3rd-party actions you can use in your workflow builder through our ActionKit API. ActionKit supports hundreds of actions across popular integration providers like Google Drive, Google Calendar, Gmail, Notion, Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, and many more. Examples of actions include sending a Slack message, creating a Salesforce contact, and querying for a Notion page.

With each action in ActionKit, our API provides:

1. Managed authentication with your users’ 3rd-party credentials for all actions

2. Parameters and data types needed for every 3rd-party action

3. Readable descriptions per action and parameter

For a video walkthrough of ActionKit and live demo, check out this short video:

To review, here’s how ActionKit would fits into your workflow builder:

1) GET Actions

The GET actions endpoint surfaces all available integration actions, with their necessary parameters, data types, and descriptions.

"googleDrive": [
	{
        "type": "function",
        "function": {
          "name": "GOOGLE_DRIVE_LIST_FILES",
          "description": "Triggered when a user wants to list files in Google Drive",
          "parameters": {
            "type": "object",
            "properties": {
              "includeFolders": {
                "type": "boolean",
                "description": "Include Folders"
              },
              "parentId": {
                "type": "string",
                "description": "Folder"
              },
              "pageSize": {
                "type": "string",
                "description": "Page Size"
              },
              ...
            },
            "required": [
              "includeFolders"
            ],
            "additionalProperties": false

The action data returned is perfect for building steps or nodes in your workflow builder using the returned parameters. Here’s an example of what a step may look like in your workflow builder:

These actions will also surface any custom objects and fields your users may have configured in their 3rd-party application, like custom fields in Salesforce.

2) POST Actions

The POST Actions endpoint is how your workflow builder application can actually perform the action. In your workflow engine, calling a POST request with the action name and parameters is all it takes to perform an action with ActionKit.

const parameters = {
    includeFolders: true
};

const response = await fetch("<https://actionkit.useparagon.com/projects/>" + 
                              process.env.PARAGON_PROJECT_ID + 
                              "/actions", 
	{
	    method: "POST",
	    headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json", "Authorization": "Bearer " + jwt },
	    body: JSON.stringify({ action: 'GOOGLE_DRIVE_LIST_FILES', parameters: parameters })
	});
	
const body = await response.json();
return body;

Customer Example: Copy.ai

If you're curious how our customers have implemented this into their own product, here is a demo of Copy.ai's workflow builder.

Wrapping Up

Give your workflow orchestration product access to 3rd-party actions, enabling your users to expand what they can build on your platform. Paragon makes it easy to build these 3rd-party actions in your UI and workflow engine without worrying about OAuth and with less research into 3rd-party APIs and their inputs.

If you’d like to learn more about ActionKit and how Paragon can help scale integrations for your product, book a demo with our team.