Zapier WorkFlow
Message sent to Zapier

MESG-Z

A Zapier Connector built on the decentralized application network MESG.

Inspiration

MESG - The new economy of app development wants to take advantage of distributed services to streamline applications, but the ecosystem of services available on blockchain are small. With MESG-Z, users of MESG can easily integrate their blockchain based application with exising centralized services using Zapier, and this Zapier connector.

How to Install

Add the service to your docker swarm with mesg-core service deploy https://github.com/JBarna/MESG-Z

To gain access to the MESG app on Zapier, open a ticket and I will invite you!

Example Application

In this example A MESG application waits for

An incoming webhook
Goes out to Zapier to retrieve centralized resources
Sends a messages with those resources to Slack

Schema

Load Sample Data

loadSample:
  inputs:
    triggerType:
      description: "The type of zapier trigger that this sample corresponds to"
      type: String
    sampleData:
      description: "The sample of data that will be sent to Zapier to start your zap"
      type: Object
  outputs:
    success:
      name: "Success"
      description: "Output when Zapier returns with Data"
      data:
        outputs:
          type: Any
    error:
      data:
        error:
          type: Any

Execute a Zap Workflow and retrieve data

execute:
  inputs:
    triggerType:
      description: "The type of zapier trigger that will fire. Defined in your Zapier Trigger" 
      type: String
    data:
      description: "The data to send to the Zapier trigger to be used in the following Zapier steps"
      type: Object
  outputs:
    success:
      name: "Success"
      description: "Output when Zapier returns with Data"
      data:
        outputs:
          type: Any
    error:
      data:
        error:
          type: Any

Challenges I ran into

The ran into two main challenges:

Building the MESG Zapier App (on the Zapier side) is time consuming and there are more parts than you would expect for such a simple application.
The node.js MESG SDK does not expose the execution ID to the services, so I had to store the success callback in memory. This is not optimal as any service restart will wipe the history of existing zaps.