Concepts

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Integration

An integration defines how your application will interact with a third party SaaS tool. You will have a single integration for all of your customers that are connecting your application with a particular SaaS product. For example, you might have an integration called mySalesforceIntegration. Salesforce is the provider that we are integrating with.

You create an integration by defining it in a manifest file and then deploying it using the amp CLI. (See Define Integrations and CLI Overview).

An installation is specific to a single customer that sets up one of your integrations to connect with their SaaS instance. For example, mySalesforceIntegration might have 30 installations - one for each of your customers that have connected their Salesforce instance with your application.

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Installation

An installation is an instance of an integration, for a particular customer. It is created:

• when a customer connects their SaaS instance in an embeddable UI component
• or when you make an API call to the CreateInstallation or ImportInstallation endpoints.

An installation captures the following information:

• the credentials for connecting to the customer’s SaaS instance. (Ampersand supports OAuth, Basic Auth, and API Key based authentication.) We call this the connection.
• a customer’s preference for which objects and fields they want your application to read or write, and fields they’ve mapped. We call this the config.

For other terminology, refer to Terminology.