About the project
We built the mighty little Merit Integrations App on Zapier, which allows Merit’s users to instantly connect Merit with 3,000+ apps -- and, by that, to create and automate workflows for sending, revoking and editing merits.
The objective was to enable zero-code integrations with hundreds of existing and popular platforms for organizations by building an integration with Zapier to cover core platform functions. To get there, we built a custom, transparent proxy bridging Merit’s custom authentication flow to Zapier Oauth2 and custom logging.
In order to make the integration available to all organizations -- in as streamlined a manner as possible -- we modified Zapier’s OAuth authentication method through custom code execution at specific stages. This allows for all these disparate organizations to be linked to a single Merit API App, all without sharing the app credentials. (Note: In order to most easily identify API Traffic originating from Zapier, apps are created in a template-ized fashion that allows data science to differentiate them from other API apps.)
Merit users can easily automate their workflows using any of the following actions:
- Edit a Merit (One or More Fields) Edit one or more fields of an existing merit. Very useful in cases where you only need to edit some of the data on a merit or only have access to some of the data on the merit currently.
- Edit a Merit If a merit can be edited for the given user (as found by email & template) edit that merit using the provided data. If no merit can be found, a new merit can be issued if desired. All required data for the given merit must be provided.
- Send a Merit Send a merit to a user. (This is the most efficient action if you know that you only want to send new merits.)
- Revoke a Merit Revoke a merit of the specified template from the user as designated by email.
We exclusively used the Node.js Javascript framework for development of the project, and it is validated, deployed and maintained through the Zapier Platform CLI. This allows for development teams to collaborate using version control and CI -- and build more advanced integrations with custom coding for every part of API calls and response parsing.
