Integrations Overview

The Kinetic Platform is designed to adapt to your organization’s existing ecosystem, not replace it. Whether you're connecting to cloud applications, databases, or internal tools, Kinetic offers a flexible integration model that allows you to orchestrate actions across systems and automate workflows end-to-end.

At its core, integrations in Kinetic are handled through Bridges, Handlers, Connections, and Operations. This modular approach allows you to plug into external systems without hardcoding logic directly into forms or workflows, making updates and adjustments easier to maintain.

Recent enhancements have expanded our capabilities to support direct SQL and Postgres database connections through the Connections & Operations interface. This provides a powerful alternative to legacy bridge models, offering more control, visibility, and reusability—especially when designing complex workflows that depend on external data sources.

Depending on your use case, integrations can be:

Triggered by form submissions or workflow events
Used to enrich data from external systems before rendering
Called directly within logic nodes to retrieve, post, or update external information

While support for Bridges and Handlers remains in place for backward compatibility and specific system types, we encourage new implementations to use Connections & Operations whenever possible to take advantage of the latest tooling.

Types of Integrations

Our integration framework supports a range of use cases through multiple integration types. This flexibility ensures that customers can connect to virtually any system, regardless of architecture, protocol, or data format.

1. Connections & Operations

Use case: RESTful CRUD operations across external systems
Where used: Forms, workflows, and front-ends
How it works: These are low-code, in-platform integrations designed for speed and reusability. They make it easy to query, update, and manage data across systems that expose a REST interface.
Example: Creating a user in Active Directory or retrieving a ticket from ServiceNow.

2. Handlers

Use case: Custom business logic or system interactions within workflows
Where used: Workflows
How it works: Written in Ruby, Handlers are self-contained functions that define inputs and outputs through a standardized convention. Developers can build and test locally, then deploy to Kinetic for runtime use. Handlers support any protocol and allow for full customization.
Example: Authenticating via an OAuth flow, posting to a SOAP service, or transforming data for a legacy mainframe.

3. Bridges

Use case: Real-time data collection from external systems
Where used: Forms, front-ends
How it works: Developed in Java and deployed into the Kinetic Agent (our integration harness), Bridges enable Forms and front-end javascript to dynamically query data from external systems on the fly. Bridge adapters define the business logic and follow a standardized convention for querying and returning data back to the Kinetic Platform.
Example: Retrieving a list of users from Active Directory and presenting them in a Forms dropdown list.

4. Filestores

Use case: Streaming files and documents from external systems
Where used: Front-ends
How it works: Like Bridges, but optimized for handling documents and large files. They connect to file stores, retrieve documents, and present them inside the Kinetic Platform dynamically.
Example: Streaming PDFs from a document management system or displaying image files from a secure server.

5. WebAPIs

Use case: Triggering Kinetic workflows from external systems
Where used: Public-facing endpoints
How it works: WebAPIs expose dynamic REST endpoints that accept inbound requests from third-party applications. Incoming payloads are securely parsed and can initiate workflows within the platform. This allows external systems to seamlessly interact with Kinetic processes.
Example: A procurement system sending a purchase request to initiate a fulfillment workflow in Kinetic.

In the sections that follow, you'll find guidance on how to configure integrations, test them effectively, and manage their lifecycle as part of your operational infrastructure.