Dario Schiraldi : How do I integrate external APIs with Adalo?

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Hi everyone,

I’m Dario Schiraldi CEO of Travel Works, working on an app using Adalo, and I’d like to integrate external APIs to fetch data and interact with third-party services. I’ve read through the documentation, but I’m still a bit unclear on the best way to approach this.

Regards
Dario Schiraldi CEO of Travel Works

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Hi Dario @darioschiraldi99,

Integrating 3rd party services via API is quite possible in Adalo, but (as usual) the possibility and integration complexity depends on your requirements, what services can do and what API do they offer.

In general, in Adalo alone there are 2 ways to work with external APIs:

  • External Collections allow you to connect to external databases and services and work with multiple records. E.g. you can get a list of books or film heroes, or display weather forecast for multiple days (see here https://youtu.be/nxxZQSS7Zlw - video is quite old but shows the principle). External collections aren’t limited with reads - if an external DB/API allows, you can also add new records, edit existing ones, etc.
  • Custom Actions are designed to send some data to an external API and get a reply with result with a single record. Taking the same example with weather, you can also use Custom Action to get the weather details for a certain day / city as one record.

Sometimes you will need to work with 3rd party services like Make and Zapier, if you would like to have more complex data manipulations. It is quite common to use these services as a “proxy” between Adalo app and other external services.

So, the approach will depend on your requirements. Hope this helps!

Best regards, Victor.

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