How to use IBM App Connect with IBM Cloudant

Connecting to IBM Cloudant

To connect App Connect to an IBM Cloudant account that you want App Connect to use, you need the following connection details:

• If your service instance uses IBM Cloud® Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication only, or both legacy credentials and IAM, provide the following connection details:
  • Cloudant host: The host name of the instance
  • Cloudant API key: The API key for the instance
• If your service instance uses legacy credentials for authentication, provide the following connection details:
  • Cloudant user name: The name of the service instance user
  • Cloudant password: The password for the specified user name
  • Example of completed fields for connecting from App Connect using IAM authentication only, or both legacy credentials and IAM

To connect to IBM Cloudant from the App Connect Designer Catalog page for the first time, under IBM Cloudant click Connect. This creates an account in App Connect. For more information about ways to connect to IBM Cloudant, see Managing accounts in App Connect.

What should I consider first?

Before you use App Connect Designer with IBM Cloudant, take note of the following considerations:

• To use Cloudant with App Connect, you must have provisioned a Cloudant NoSQL DB service on IBM Cloud.
• To configure the New document action, the Document ID field is optional. If you do not specify a value or data mapping, IBM Cloudant will assign an ID to the document created.
• You can specify your Cloudant document data structure as data properties (with name and data type) or as a JSON object that consists of comma-separated name/value pairs. For example:
  • Cloudant document data structure specified as data properties:
    

    (Click the image to view full size.)

    To specify your Cloudant document data structure as data properties, click Add property under the 'Document data' heading. (If you have been specifying document data as JSON, ensure that the ‘Document data’ field is empty and then click Add property.) For more information about specifying data properties, see Defining your own data properties.

  • Cloudant document data structure specified as JSON:
    

    (Click the image to view full size.)

    To specify your Cloudant document data structure as JSON, ensure that there are no properties under the ‘Document data’ heading and then click ‘Edit mappings’.

• (General consideration) You can see lists of the trigger events and actions that are available on the Catalog page of the App Connect Designer.

  For some applications, the events and actions in the catalog depend on the environment (IBM Cloud Pak for Integration or App Connect on IBM Cloud) and whether the connector supports configurable events and dynamic discovery of actions. If the application supports configurable events, you see a Show more configurable events link under the events list. If the application supports dynamic discovery of actions, you see a Show more link under the actions list.

• (General consideration) If you are using multiple accounts for an application, the set of fields that is displayed when you select an action for that application can vary for different accounts. In the flow editor, some applications always provide a curated set of static fields for an action. Other applications use dynamic discovery to retrieve the set of fields that are configured on the instance that you are connected to. For example, if you have two accounts for two instances of an application, the first account might use settings that are ready for immediate use. However, the second account might be configured with extra custom fields.

Events and actions

IBM Cloudant events

These events are for changes in this application that trigger a flow to start performing the actions in the flow.

IBM Cloudant actions

These are actions on this application that you want a flow to complete.

Attachments

Create attachment

Retrieve attachments

Update or create attachment

Databases

Create database

Retrieve databases

Delete database

Documents

Create document

Retrieve documents

Update document

Update or create document

Delete document

Views

Apply view

More items are available when you have connected App Connect to IBM Cloudant.