AWS App Studio is in preview and is subject to change.
Automations concepts
Here are some concepts and terms to know when defining and configuring your app's business logic using automations in App Studio.
Automations
Built in the application studio, automations are how you define the business logic of your application. The main components of an automation are: triggers that start the automation, a sequence of one or more actions, input parameters used to pass data to the automation, and an output.
Actions
An automation action, commonly referred to as an action, is an individual step of logic that make up an automation. Each action performs a specific task, whether it's sending an email, creating a data record, invoking a Lambda function, or calling APIs. Actions are added to automations from the action library, and can be grouped into conditional statements or loops.
Automation input parameters
Automation input parameters are dynamic input values that you can pass in from components to automations to make them flexible and reusable. Think of parameters as variables for your automation, instead of hard-coding values into an automation, you can define parameters and provide different values when needed. Parameters allow you to use the same automation with different inputs each time it is run.
Mocked output
Some actions interact with external resources or services using connectors. When using the preview environment, applications do not interact with external services. To test actions that use connectors in the preview environment, you can use mocked output to simulate the connector's behavior and output. The mocked output is configured using JavaScript, and the result is stored in an action's results, just as the connector's response is stored in a published app.
By using mocking, you can use the preview environment to test various scenarios and their impact on other actions with the automation such as simulating different result values, error scenarios, edge cases, or unhappy paths without calling the external service through connectors.
Automation output
An automation output is used to pass values from one automation to other resources of an app, such as components or other automations. Automation outputs are configured as expressions, and the expression can return a static value or a dynamic value computed from automation parameters and actions. By default, automations do not return any data, including the results of actions within the automation.
A couple of examples of how automation outputs can be used:
You can configure an automation output to return an array, and pass that array to populate a data component.
You can use an automation to calculate a value, and pass that value into multiple other automations as a way to centralize and reuse business logic.
Triggers
Trigger determine when, and on what conditions, an automation will run. Some examples of triggers are
On click for buttons and On select for text inputs. The type of component determines the list of available triggers for that component.
Triggers are added to components and configured in the application studio.
