App Connect

Co-author – Srihari Ananda Kumar 

Google Chat is a secure messaging application meant to facilitate communications within the Google Workspace environment. It enables you to work with your team quickly and efficiently by collaborating via text, creating collaborative chat rooms, sharing documents, delivering presentations, and setting up web conferences.

Building a flow in IBM App Connect with Google Chat

Use App Connect to build flows that integrate with Google Chat and other applications. The connector is displayed as Google Chat on the App Connect User Interface (UI). 

To allow App Connect to connect to your Google Chat account, you need to complete the connection fields that you see in the App Connect Designer Catalog page or flow editor.

For more information on connection fields, see How to use App Connect with Google Chat.

Google Chat objects

The following are the Google Chat objects that can be run in App Connect.

Scenario 1: Send a Google Chat welcome message with a Dropbox link to all the attendees of a Google Calendar event

Consider this scenario where you use App Connect to send a welcome message to all the attendees in a Google Chat space with a Dropbox link whenever a Google Calendar event is created. A folder is created in Dropbox to store all the artifacts related to the Google Calendar event, and the link is shared with the event attendees.

In this flow:

1. The flow is triggered whenever a new event is created in Google Calendar.
   
   
2. Google Chat retrieves the Chat spaces.
   
   
3. The Google Calendar event summary text is checked across the Google Chat spaces.
   
   
4. If the event summary text is found in the display name of the Google Chat space, a message gets posted on the Google Chat space that the space already exists in Google Chat.
   
   
5. Else, a new Google Chat space is created based on the Google Calendar Summary.
   
   For example:
   
   1. A folder is created in Dropbox. 
      This folder will be used to store all the relevant materials for the Google Calendar event. Google Chat will use this folder location to send messages to the event attendees.
      
      
   2. The Google Calendar attendees are added to the Google Chat space (that was created in step 5) based on their email addresses. 
      
      For example:
      
      
6. A welcome message gets posted in the Google Chat space along with the Dropbox folder location.
   
   For example:
   
   

In summary, let's consider a scenario in which a new event is created on Google Calendar, titled "Google Chat Closeout". A space with the name “Google Chat Closeout” gets created in Google Chat, and all the attendees of this event will be added to this space based on their email addresses.

A Dropbox folder is created where all the relevant artifacts from the event can be placed for the attendees’ reference.

A welcome message is then sent in the Google Chat Closeout space with the Dropbox folder path, so the attendees can collaborate with each other.

Figure1: Complete flow part-1

Figure2: Complete flow part-2

Resources

Try out our templates

You can view the following use cases in the Templates gallery in your App Connect Designer instance.

The following use cases are available in the Templates gallery on App Connect Designer.

• Send a Google Chat welcome message with a Dropbox link to all the attendees of a Google Calendar event

  Template URL: https://<your-instance-id>/templates/Send%20a%20Google%20Chat%20welcome%20message%20with%20a%20Dropbox%20link%20to%20all%20the
%20attendees%20of%20a%20Google%20Calendar%20event


• Send a Google Chat message to the Zendesk Service ticket assignee with a Dropbox link for tickets with urgent priority
  Template URL: https://<your-instance-id>/templates/Send%20a%20Google%20Chat%20message%20to%20the%20Zendesk%20Service%20ticket%20assignee%20with
%20a%20Dropbox%20link%20for%20tickets%20with%20urgent%20priority



You must enable the Designer AI features in your containerized environment to access the App Connect templates. For more information, see The preloaded IBM App Connect templates.

You can also import these use cases directly into your App Connect Designer. These templates are added to a public GitHub repository at https://github.com/ot4i/app-connect-templates/tree/cp4i-templates/resources. For more information about the supported connectors, see App Connect Connectors.

For any inquiries on this blog or connector, contact Srihari at srihakum@in.ibm.com.

#AppConnect
#googlechat