Artisan IMG > Alida (alida) (2066d3d5-71cc-47d1-b66e-770530b5ab30)

Alida
2.1

Alida is a customer insights platform that uncovers actionable earned data, profiling the customer at every interaction producing richer customer insights.

Overview
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Alida (formerly Vision Critical) is a continuous customer insights solution provider that enables a consistent flow of rich customer feedback optimizing and driving a business outcome while ensuring a world-class customer journey through the unique combination of deep customer insight and broad customer feedback.

Authentication
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When using the Alida connector, the first thing you will need to do is go to your Tray.io account page, and select the workflow you wish to work on. Once in the workflow builder itself, search and drag the Alida connector from the connectors panel (on the left hand side) onto your workflow.

With the new Alida connector step highlighted, in the properties panel on the right, click on the ‘Authenticate’ panel followed by ‘Add new Authentication’ (located under the Authentication input field).

This will result in a Tray.io authentication pop-up window. The first page will ask you to name your authentication, and state which type of authentication you wish to create ('Personal' or 'Organisational').

As you can see, the next page asks you for your 'Community API key name', 'API key', 'Client ID' & 'Client secret' credentials.

In order to get these fields, head to your Alida dashboard. Click on the 'Settings' and then 'API'.

You can find 'Community API key name' in 'API URL' section. It's a part of the URL after 'https://api.visioncritical.com/v1/applications/'.

Your 'API key' is located in API credentials section. You can create 'Client ID' & 'Client secret' by pressing a 'New Credential' button.

Once you have added these fields to your Tray.io authentication popup window, click on the 'Create authentication' button. Go back to your settings authentication field (within the workflow builder properties panel), and select the recently added authentication from the dropdown options now available.

Your connector authentication setup should now be complete.

Available Operations
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The examples below show one or two of the available connector operations in use.

Please see the Full Operations Reference at the end of this page for details on all available operations for this connector.

Note on Operations usage
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Update Member
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The Update Member Variable Value & Update Member Variable operations rather than update specific fields, replace the initial entity with new data, therefore you need to provide the entire entity in the request, otherwise empty fields will be replaced by default values.

Using the Raw HTTP Request ('Universal Operation')
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As of version 1.0, you can effectively create your own operations.

This is a very powerful feature which you can put to use when there is an endpoint in Alida which is not used by any of our operations.

To use this you will first of all need to research the endpoint in the Alida API documentation v1.0 , to find the exact format that Alida will be expecting the endpoint to be passed in.

Note that you will only need to add the suffix to the endpoint, as the base URL will be automatically set (the base URL is picked up from the value you entered when you created your authentication).

The base URL for Alida is: https://api.visioncritical.com/v1/applications/{communityApiKeyName}

For example, say that the 'List Member Values' operation did not exist in our Alida connector, and you wanted to use this endpoint, you would use the Alida API docs to find the relevant endpoint - which in this case is a GET request called: /membervalues.

More details can be found here.

As you can see there is also the option to include a query parameter, should you wish to do so. So if you know what your method, endpoint and details of your query parameters are, you can get the Member Values information with the following settings:

Method: GET

Endpoint: /membervalues

Query Parameter: Key: limit Value: 20

Query Parameter: Key: offset Value: 0

Body Type : None

Final Example outcome being: https://api.visioncritical.com/v1/applications/{communityApiKeyName}/membervalues?limit=20&offset=0

Example Usage
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TRAY POTENTIAL: Tray.io is extremely flexible. By design there is no fixed way of working with it - you can pull whatever data you need from other services and work with it using our core and helper connectors. This demo which follows shows only one possible way of working with Tray.io and the alida connector. Once you've finished working through this example please see our Introduction to working with data and jsonpaths page and Data Guide for more details.

Below is an example of a way in which you could potentially use the Alida connector, to retrieve information about a selection of Member Variables.

The steps will be as follows:

  1. Setup using a manual trigger and add 'List Member Variables' step

  2. Add 'Loop collection' step to iterate through your datasets

  3. Add 'Get Member Variable' step to gather the information required

The final outcome should look like this:

1 - Setup using a manual trigger and add 'List Member Variables' step
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Once you have clicked 'Create new workflow' from your main Tray.io dashboard named it, select the Manual trigger from the trigger options available:

After you have been redirected to the Tray.io workflow dashboard, from the connectors panel on the left, add a Alida connector to your second step. Set the operation to 'List Member Variables'. As the collection of Member Variables could be quite large, in this example we only going to get 20 items, but setting 'Limit' field to 20.

Feel free to re-name your steps as you go along to make things clearer for yourself and other users.

2 - Loop Collection
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Next, search for the 'Loop collection' connector within your connector panel, and drag it into your workflow as your next step. Set your operations to 'Loop list'.

The Loop Collection connector allows you to iterate through a list of results. In this example, we will use it to iterate through the data found within the previous 'List datasets' connector step.

In order to specify the list you want to loop through, start by using the 'List' mapping icon (found next to the list input field, within the properties panel) to generate the connector-snake.

While hovering over the 'List Member Variables' step (with the tail end of the connector-snake), select items from the list of output properties displayed. This will auto-populate a jsonpath within your 'List' input field, and update the type selector to jsonpath.

JSONPATHS: For more information on what jsonpaths are and how to use jsonpaths with Tray, please see our pages on Basic data concepts and Mapping data between steps

CONNECTOR-SNAKE: The simplest and easiest way to generate your jsonpaths is to use our feature called the Connector-snake. Please see the main page for more details.

Now when the workflow is run, the Loop Collection step will iterate through the each item found within the previously created list.

3 - Get dataset
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The final step is to drag a final Alida connector INSIDE of the actual Loop Collection step itself. Set the operation to 'Get Member Variable'. As you can see, the 'Member variable ID' fields is required.

In the 'Member variable ID' field use the connector-snake once more and assign it to the id value, produced by the Loop Collection connector from the previous step.

When run, this workflow will retrieve detailed information about each of the companies found:

BEST PRACTICES: Whenever you do decide to create your own workflow, be sure to check out some of our key articles such as: