Create application objects with third-party data

Note: This article focuses on use cases involving application objects and third-party data (application requests). If you're just getting started with application objects, please review the general application objects article first.

Application objects allow you to transform text or URLs found in comments or messages into structured Orders, Shipments, Itineraries, Tasks etc. that are easy to access right from a conversation in Front.

That core functionality is available on the latest Growth plan and above, but customers on the Scale plan or above can use application requests to populate an application object's custom fields with data pulled from a third-party application.

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A few examples where application objects with third-party data are useful:

• You want to see metadata about the objects you're dealing with, directly within Front. For example, the expected arrival date of a shipment, the completion status of a task, or the teammate that owns an itinerary could be synced onto the application object and visible from Front without opening any external tools.

• You want to use object metadata to power rules in Front. For example, routing conversations to a particular teammate depending on the owner of an associated load in your CRM.

• You want to use object metadata to generate a useful target URL for your application object. This is sometimes needed if the matched text or URL pattern is not enough to generate a useful target URL.

Application objects make these use cases possible without writing any API code or hosting your own server, so long as you have access to an API that allows you to retrieve the data you're looking for.

At a high level, application objects with third-party data work by allowing you to connect Front with an external API to fetch relevant data for your objects. Using Front's Application Servers feature, no code or self-hosting is required.

Step 1

After you've created an app, select the Servers tab and then click Create server.

Step 2

Set the Origin field to the URL origin of your API. Don't worry about the particular API endpoint you'll be using yet — this field should just include the origin. For example, if the API endpoint you want to use is https://api.airtable.com/v0/{baseId}/{tableIdOrName}/{recordId}, the origin would be https://api.airtable.com

Step 3

Set the Authentication strategy used by your API. Today, API Key, Basic, Bearer, and OAuth2 authentication are supported. Depending on the strategy you select, you may be asked to provide additional configuration fields. Finally, click Create.

Step 4

After creating the Server, open it once more to set the Local credentials. These credentials should be the ones that allow you to connect to the third-party API. For example, if you selected API Key as the Authentication strategy in Step 3, you would save the particular token you use to access the API in Local credentials.

That's it! Your Server is now ready to make API requests. 

The following steps assume you already have an application object set up. If you haven't, follow the instructions in the general application objects article.

Step 1

On the application object configuration page, click on the Build request step.

Step 2

Select the server you just created and enter the path of the API endpoint you want to use, with any relevant variables filled in using variables from the original text pattern of your application object.

For example, let's imagine we wanted to use Airtable's Get record endpoint: https://api.airtable.com/v0/{baseId}/{tableIdOrName}/{recordId}.

The base ID and table ID would be static for all of our application objects, but the record ID would be pulled from the text pattern. Therefore, we'd configure the path as follows:

Note that "appti123" and "tbl23" are set statically, whereas the dynamic portion of the URL ("DIGITS1") comes from the Digits variable we created in the Text pattern field from the Create reference step.

When a matching text pattern is identified by the application object, Front will send a GET request to the server and path specified using the Local credentials you previously configured.

In order to move to the next step, you need to test your request by entering a matching reference and clicking Test request. In our example using Airtable, we'll receive a response looking like this:

{
  "createdTime": "2022-09-12T21:03:48.000Z",
  "fields": {
    "Expected arrival date": "4/13/2023",
    "Name": "Engine",
    "Team": "Red Bull"
  },
  "id": "rec123"
}

Step 3

For each piece of metadata you want to add to your object, determine what data you want to extract from the response by expanding the response in the Extract properties section. Click the response property you want to save. Doing so will open a modal window to save the property as a dynamic variable. Accept the default display name or choose one that is easy for your end-user (workflow admins) to consume.

For example, to extract the "Expected arrival date" property from our example above as its own variable, expand the response, expand the "fields" object, and click the "Expected arrival date" property. This will ask you to save the "Expected arrival date" property as a dynamic variable with a default type of "String". After you click Save, you can see the dynamic variable on the righthand sidebar and open it to view its details.

Step 4

Once you've set up your dynamic variables, they can be inserted into the application object's properties using the "+" button.

In our example, since we extracted the “Arrival date” from the Airtable API, we can now insert it into the object's custom field:

Step 5

Finally, click Next to test your application object configuration. If properly configured, you should see the data from your API enriched on the application object:

Check out these step-by-step walkthroughs to continue exploring how to set up application objects to retrieve data via an API:

• Basic application object handler

• No-code application object

Once you've configured an application object with third-party data that syncs metadata onto your objects, you can use that metadata in Smart Rules by creating conditions that check against the objects attached to the conversation.

For more details, check out our articles on Smart Rule variables and How to build a Smart Rule.

Metadata will be refreshed for a particular object each time its reference is found in a message or comment, or when used in a dynamic variable (for example, within a rule or macro). You can also manually send an API request with the reference of the object using https://dev.frontapp.com/reference/create-link to refresh it.

Learn more about refreshing application objects here.

Application objects connected to third-party data are available on the Scale plan or above.