Building my first App (Monday startguide for integrations)

Hi, sorry with this basics questions, but i need help.
Im dealing with creating the Monday.com suggested integration to detect a text change in one text column and put his content in another text column.
Im having two questions:

  1. I was able to create it following all the steps, but the created recipe doesnt allow me to select and change the target text column (i have followed all the previous steps).

  2. What s this all about? Why i have to run the app from a local server?
    Again, i was able to to this but like a robot, not understanding anything.

  3. The steps mentioned an number 2, they are needed to do on every app i build??? (probably i will not be able to built anything but i ll try :smiley: :smiley: :smiley)

I’m starting from far behind
give me a chance please
thanks

Updated status. I made it work!
Questions number 2 and 3 are still pending

Hi @hlopezvc, Hernan,

Lot’s of questions :slight_smile:, let’s give it a try. When you build an app with an integration feature you need to build a recipe. A recipe (sentence) contains a trigger and an action. As long as you use the standard available triggers and actions, you don’t need to have a local environment, server or do any coding at all. An example is like this:


The apps you can build this way are not very exiting, almost all the automations you can build this way are already available in the standard automations.

The fun part starts when you create custom actions . In that case you can still use a standard trigger like “When status change to something” and the action will be a call to a service on the web defined by the RUN URL. That server can be you local machine when you use nginx to open an IP tunnel, or a server you have hosted somewhere on the Internet.

As an example: my setup is a VPS hosted on the Internet with a Plesk environment so I can host multiple websites and services on the same VPS. The “backend” of my apps (the actions called by the triggers) are coded in nodeJS (server side JavaSript).

You also will need to authorize the app to get a token, or choose to hard code your API key in the backend - which is not a good idea if you want to share with other users in other accounts.

Hope that gives you a glue on why you need a server or an IP tunnel to your local machine.

1 Like

@basdebruin thanks for your comments here.

I have posted some new recipe ideas to build if you like to take a look at this.

In the meantime while i was configuring my first app i notice that formula columns are not included on trigger or action options. They are not avaliable or supported yet to work with Apps?=

Correct about formula columns, see my answer here App idea: Working with formulas (automation recipes) - #2 by basdebruin