Prebuilt Activities
Every outbound call from a workflow has to run inside an activity so the runtime records its result. For your own logic that means writing an activity function. For the calls almost every integration makes, the runtime ships the wrapper for you.
Prebuilt activities are ready-made, durable wrappers around the most common connector calls. You pick an existing connection and fill in the call, and the runtime records the result exactly as it would for an activity you wrote yourself. Nothing to wrap, and nothing to keep in sync when the call changes.
Three are available today:
| Prebuilt activity | Calls through | Returns |
|---|---|---|
| Call REST API | An http:Client connection | The response payload, bound to the type you choose |
| Call SOAP API | A soap11:Client or soap12:Client connection | The response envelope as xml |
| Send Email (SMTP) | An email:SmtpClient connection | Nothing |
Add one to a workflow
- On the workflow diagram, click +.
- In the node panel, under Workflow > Steps, click Call Activity.
- In the Activities panel, under Prebuilt Activities, click the one you need.
- Choose the Connection to call through, fill in the call's fields, and click Save.
The call appears on the diagram as an ordinary activity node, and it behaves like one: recorded on success, retryable on failure, and visible as an ACTIVITY node in the Integration Control Plane execution graph.
Fields shared by all three
Each prebuilt activity has its own fields, covered on its page. These are common to all of them:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Approval Policy | No Approval, or Human Approval to have a person approve the call before it runs. See Error handling and review activities. |
| Retry Policy | What the engine does when the call fails: No Retry, Auto Retry for backoff retries, Human Review to hand the failure to a person, or Retry, then Review to retry first and hand the failure to a person if the retries run out. See Error handling and review activities. |
| Check Error | Propagates a failure to the workflow with check. Clear it to handle the error yourself. Under the advanced fields. |
A completed prebuilt activity never runs twice, but a failed attempt runs again once Auto Retry is on. That matters most for calls that change something: a retried POST or a retried email can create a duplicate. Send an idempotency key with the request where the API supports one, or keep retries off for calls that cannot be repeated safely.
When to write your own activity instead
Reach for a custom activity when the call is not one of the three above, when you want several calls recorded as a single step, or when the response needs shaping before the workflow sees it. Two actions in the Activities panel cover the middle ground:
- Create Activity from a Connection generates an activity function around an action on a connector you already have, which is the route for connectors other than HTTP, SOAP, and SMTP.
- Create Activity writes an empty activity function for you to design.
Next steps
- Call REST API — invoke an HTTP endpoint and bind the response to a type.
- Call SOAP API — send a SOAP envelope and read the response.
- Send Email (SMTP) — send a message through an SMTP connection.
- Activities — how activities are recorded, retried, and shown in the execution graph.