MuleSoft allows you to connect anything, from SaaS applications to social media. With Flow Designer, the burden of app configuration has been streamlined as it allows you to reuse existing connection configurations and enables collaboration by letting you share them with others inside your business group.
Sharing connections
The benefits of shared connections
In a typical integration project, you need to connect various systems together, and each of these systems requires some global configuration; credentials, security tokens or some sort of authentication information are typically required to connect to each system. Chances are you also have multiple projects all requiring the same connection information. With this comes two main areas of concern. First of all, security, publishing credentials to developers that need access to a system. Second of all maintenance, duplicating connection information across multiple projects, updating/rotating credentials and so on.
One instance where shared connections would be useful is for system administrators to enable non-administrators access to integrations that require administrative-level permissions. This capability simplifies maintenance because the integration is unaffected by user credential changes.
Moreover, if the non-admin user changes their personal password or leaves the company, the integration is unaffected.
How to share a connection
When you add a connection in Flow Designer, simply check the “share this connection” box to enable sharing with your business group. Now all users in your business group can use the connection in their Flow Designer projects.
Make sure to save both your connection and your configuration to apply changes.
Is it safe to share a connection?
Security is a key feature of Flow Designer. In order to maintain security, ordinary users of shared connections cannot view the contents of the connection (e.g., usernames and passwords are hidden). Only the creator of a shared connection can view and change those configurations.
Edit or delete shared connections
When credentials change, the creator of the connection can edit or delete the shared connection. This will immediately update any Flow Designer projects currently in the design process, but not Mule applications that have already been deployed to CloudHub.
Conclusion
You can now centralize, share, and reuse your connector configuration in Flow Designer. This new feature simplifies the sharing of credentials and reduces the maintenance effort of updating and rotating credentials across multiple applications.
It adds an extra layer of security too. Only the creator of the shared configuration can view and change the underlying details.
All of this has been achieved without writing a single line of code. Try out Flow Designer by starting your free trial now.
