Clients

In Alumio, Clients, are configurations that facilitate communication with a system by configuring how to handle requests and responses in one single place. This makes sure you don't have to configure the connection with a system where you use the Client, but just in that one place.

Alumio provides you with many 'predefined' Clients for specific systems. That way you don't have to figure out in which header a system requires the authentication key. It's not necessary to use the predefined Client, and because a predefined Client generally has less options it might not be the best choice.

There are a few types of Clients, but we will focus just on HTTP Clients.

Plugins

• Setting the Base URI: by adding a Plugin called "Add Base URI to Requests"
• Log Requests: Add this plugin to log requests made to the system, and their responses. Generally, "Long" is a good compromise between large logs and enough information.
• Append request headers: Use this plugin (or the others about headers) to add headers the system might need.
• Add content type: many systems need the "Content-Type" header, this plugin automatically adds this to every request, based on your request body.
• Retry Requests on failure: this allows the Client to automatically retry when the call fails. This prevents the task to actually fail, so is often incredibly useful.
• Ratelimit based on header: if the other system uses a ratelimiting system AND follows certain standards, this might be useful. If they don't follow the exact standards that Alumio expects, you can still use the Retry Requests on Failure.

You can also add "Authentications" to the client. There are many different forms of authentication available.

Error Handling

Under Error Handling & Connections, there are a few very useful options. You can set Alumio to see several HTTP statusses as a success. This can be useful if you have to search in another API which emits a 404 when the searched entity does not exist: in that case, you'd not want a failure state.