Using authentications in workflows

In your workflows, you can interact with external services by using authentications.

When you create workflows, you might need to set up connections to external services. For example, you might create a workflow that connects to an external service, fetches data, connects to a second service, and exports the data to the second service.

To allow your workflows to dynamically connect to these services, you must provide and store the authorization credentials for the services. In IBM® Concert Workflows®, you provide and store these credentials in authentications. For more information about creating authentications, see Using authentications.

Note: In Concert Workflows, sensitive data and authentication credentials are stored securely by using the Advanced Encryption Standard - Galois/Counter Mode (AES-GCM) algorithm with a 256-bit key.

In the workflow editor, you can add authentications to your workflow by using any of these methods:

Table 1. Methods of adding authentications to workflows
Method	Steps
Authentications dialog	In the workflow editor, click Auth. In the Authentications dialog, complete only one of these steps: Select an existing authentication that you want to use. Click Create Authentication, provide the authentication details, and save your changes. In the Authentications dialog, click Use default.
Authentication variable in the Start block	In the Start block, click + Add Variable. Provide a variable name (for example, `‘my_IBMCloud_auth‘`) and select Authentication as the variable type. In the Select authentication type dialog, select the service that you want to authenticate to or select Use any authentication type. Note: You can associate your authentication variable with multiple services. For example, you can associate the variable with Ansible® and Ansible Tower API by selecting both services. Click Use authentication type. In your workflow, in each block where you intend to use this authentication, complete these steps: In the authKey field, in the dropdown, select expression. Enter the name of the variable that you created in step 1, preceded by a dollar sign (‘$’), for example, `$my_IBMCloud_auth`. Save your changes. When you run your workflow, you will be dynamically prompted to provide your authentication credentials for the service.
Authentication key variables in other blocks	In any workflow block that contains an authentication key (authkey) variable, click that variable. In the drop-down, select the authentication that you want to use or create one by clicking Create Authentication.