Harnessing the Power of the Secure Credential Store
Appian has a wonderful suite of features to ease a developer’s life when integrating with other systems. Unfortunately, there is a limitation when using the Secure Credential Store (SCS) that Appian offers - it does not work with Appian’s Integration Object or Connected Systems. When using a Connected System, you can specify that the system needs a client secret or grant type established, but these fields have to be entered in the configuration directly and cannot be stored in the SCS.
As you can see in the above image, there are “Client ID” and “Client Secret” required fields, but no field for “Grant Type” or other common authorization information needed for REST-integrations.
For some clients, this created a security concern; and the inconsistent behavior across the Appian platform caused a maintenance headache. Macedon created the HTTP Request with Secure Credentials Store plugin to allow developers to utilize the valuable SCS feature with integrations for both credentials and any other fields.
Solution Without Giving up Security or Features
Since the security requirements of some clients demanded use of the SCS, Macedon’s plugin utilizes Appian’s built-in Secure Credential Store (SCS) in addition to having custom fields to get around the aforementioned field limitations. With this plugin, Developers can place integration credentials into the SCS and then use them when running the actual integration.
Any number of fields can be stored here and masked as needed, such as fields like client secret or grant type.
The plugin also leverages Appian’s SCS feature of allowing users to save their own values (edited through their Profile in Appian). So developers won’t miss out on any part of the SCS functionality that Appian provides.
Aside from this new capability, all the other features found in making HTTP Requests are present, so anyone who has done integrations in Appian before should find it familiar and easy to use!
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