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Integration Overview

How Can I Integrate with Mendix?

Integration has always been an important part of application development, but the core challenge still remains: Integrating external systems into your applications is technically complex. Moreover, the maturation in cloud-native and as-a-service software options has increased the difficulty and complexity of connecting disparate applications together to exchange data, trigger events, and orchestrate workflow processes.

At Mendix, we want to make sure that developers of all skill levels can leverage their skills using tools that make it as simple as possible to do what they need to with external systems. To that end, we have made investments in the platform to make it easy to connect applications and services with each other in a variety of ways, including SOAP, SQL, REST, OData, and more. And while REST has become a standard for building APIs and web services for applications to talk, we recognize that other web service protocols, standardized frameworks, and APIs remain valid options depending on the problem you are trying to solve.

What Tools Can I Use for Integrating with Mendix?

Mendix offers you an extensive array of tools to handle integrations:

  • Message definitions – specify what messages you exchange with external systems; these can be based on XML schemas, JSON snippets, or entities defined in your domain models
  • Mappings – use visual specifications of how to translate external messages to and from entities in your Mendix applications
  • Web services – publish microflows as web service operations and call external web services from your microflows
  • REST services – publish microflows and entities as REST resources and operations and call external REST APIs from your microflows
  • OData – publish data in your application in a standardized REST format for easy use in business analytics tooling
  • Connectors – implement purpose-built connector modules that provide easy-to-use microflow activities integrated with third-party services; examples include SAP, Kafka, Redis, and third-party services like Slack, Twitter, and Salesforce
  • Connector Kit – the Mendix Connector Kit enables adding any custom integration using Java to Mendix in an easy, generic, and reusable way
  • Database integration – the Mendix Database Connector allows you to configure direct JDBC connections to your database of choice for executing SQL queries and stored procedures
  • Catalog – Connect external resources to an organization-specific catalog and use them in both BI tools (OData) & Mendix apps (via external entities)