Connecting Your API to Workato: Connector Options and Authentication – TrackVia

Understanding Workato connector types

Workato connectors contain the building blocks for recipes — each one includes a method of authentication, along with triggers and actions for a specific app. There are three types of connectors available:

App/Pre-Built Connectors — first-class connectors built by Workato itself.
Community Connectors — second-class connectors built by developers in the Workato Community.
Universal Connectors — custom, flexible connectors for building your own integrations.

Here's a flowchart to guide you on the best approach for your needs:

Using pre-built app connectors

Most of the time, you should be able to use one of the existing connectors already published in the Workato Connector Marketplace. Check there first before building anything custom.

Implementing a custom solution

If a pre-built connector doesn't cover your case, you have a few options for building your own triggers, actions, and connectors: custom actions, the HTTP universal connector, or the Connector SDK.

Custom actions let you build an action on top of an existing Workato connector — you focus on the HTTP request and response, and the underlying connector still handles the authorization flow for you.

Whichever approach you choose, follow Workato's security best practices for building recipes and connectors when deciding how and where to store sensitive information in your integration.

When connecting your own API to Workato from scratch, there are three suggested options:

Workato Webhook Connector
Workato HTTP Connector
Developing a Custom Connector

(If you're moving data between your API and TrackVia specifically, see Using the TrackVia Workato Connector below — it's purpose-built for that and is the recommended route.)

Option 1: Workato Webhook Connector

Webhooks are notifications an application sends to a target URL as soon as a defined event happens. See Workato's Webhooks documentation for details.

Authentication: Workato's own Webhook Connector does not require authentication to be triggered — your application or API can call the webhook directly with the expected payload (for example, a GET request with query parameters, or a POST body).

This "no auth required" behavior is specific to the Workato Webhook Connector, not to webhook connectors in general. If you need to interface with a webhook that requires authenticated credentials for creation/teardown, you'll need to build a custom connector instead.

Option 2: Workato HTTP Connector

The HTTP Connector lets you integrate with any cloud application that has an HTTP-based API — you can create a new connector, or add new triggers/actions to an existing Workato connector. See Workato's HTTP Connector documentation.

This connector relies on periodic polling: it processes a payload in batches at a fixed interval, and jobs can be polled as frequently as every 5 minutes — so it isn't instantaneous. If your use case needs an immediate response to trigger events and your app supports webhooks, use the Webhooks trigger (Option 1) instead.

Setting up the connection: Before you can interact with an API, you need to set up a connection to it. Click Link your account, and a connection popup appears where you configure the connection name, authentication type, URL, SSL, privacy settings, and so on. See HTTP Connection Setup for the full walkthrough. Once created, the connection can be used in HTTP triggers and actions.

Authentication: The preferred way to store authentication information is directly in the connection itself — this lets automated services use the connection's properties without falling back to Account Properties or local plain-text storage. The HTTP Connector supports the following authentication mechanisms:

HTTP trigger: Supports "New Event via Polling" — each new or updated record is processed as a trigger event. The number of events retrieved per poll depends on the specific API endpoint being polled. Note: this trigger does not support pagination — if the target API enforces pagination, the trigger will only read the first page of records. See Building an HTTP Trigger.

HTTP action: You can build any action supported by an API using the HTTP Connector — GET, POST, DELETE, and so on. See Building an HTTP Action.

Option 3: Developing a custom connector

Connectors built on Workato's SDK are called custom connectors. By default, they have a private scope — visible and available only to the connector's owner. Once built, you can choose to share it at various levels. See the Workato SDK documentation for details on building your own custom connector, whether for internal use or external publication.

Using the TrackVia Workato Connector

If you want to move data from your API into TrackVia, or from TrackVia into your API, use the TrackVia Workato Connector rather than building a custom HTTP integration — it's purpose-built for this and is the recommended approach.

The TrackVia Workato Connector supports the following actions:

Create record
Create user
Delete all records in view
Delete record
Get all view records
Get file from record
Get record
Update record
Upload file to a record
Custom action through HTTPS and OpenAPI (for anything not covered by the actions above)

Authentication: Connecting to TrackVia through this connector requires two credentials:

API Key (User Key) — unique to your TrackVia account. Once generated, it cannot be changed or deleted, though it can be copied for use in an integration. Every request to TrackVia requires the user_key parameter in the HTTP request header:

   user_key: <trackvia_api_user_key_value_here>

API User OAuth Token — verifies a user's identity and permission level before granting API access, which keeps access limited and permissions enforced. This token is used in the Authorization header as a Bearer token:

   Authorization: Bearer <api_access_token_value_here>

For detailed setup instructions for either credential, see API Authentication and Access.