How To Create An Integration In Magento 2

What is Magento 2 integration?

In computer science, Integration is a term that is commonly used when an application needs to interact with other applications for transferring data or triggering an action.

However, in Magento 2, integration is a definition for a third-party application that uses OAuth for authentication. It allows developers or administrators to define which resources (such as customers, orders, or catalog) the application can access.

As a Magento merchant, you can use the Magento back-end to create the integration manually or build a custom Magento extension to create that integration programmatically. 

Create Integration in Magento 2 manually

Step 1: Go to System -> Integrations Menu.

Step 2:  Click add new integration to open a new integration form.

Step 3: Enter the integration name as the form in the above picture.

Step 4: Grant access to the API resources.

Step 5: Save to create a new consumer public & secret keys for integration.

Step 6: Activate integration for creating an access token for the external application.

After activating, we can see the integration detail in the picture below.

The access token after generating can be used by any API test tools (as swagger or postman) or any 3rd party applications. Our HexaSync Integration Platform used the same method for integrating Magento 2 eCommerce website with ERP systems like Acumatica and Infor CloudSuite Industrial as well.

The example below is a simple API request for retrieving all the subcategories under the default root category of the Magento 2 sample database.

curl -X GET "https://{{your_magento_url}}/rest/all/V1/categories?rootCategoryId=2&depth=1" -H  "accept: application/json" -H  "Authorization: Bearer 9qe33ln9ff7xfpkkzkat9tq2ekbx13cy"

The JSON response data:

{
  "id": 2,
  "parent_id": 1,
  "name": "Default Category",
  "is_active": true,
  "position": 1,
  "level": 1,
  "product_count": 1181,
  "children_data": [
    {
      "id": 64,
      "parent_id": 2,
      "name": "What's New",
      "is_active": true,
      "position": 1,
      "level": 2,
      "product_count": 0,
      "children_data": []
    },
    {
      "id": 46,
      "parent_id": 2,
      "name": "Women",
      "is_active": true,
      "position": 2,
      "level": 2,
      "product_count": 0,
      "children_data": []
    },
    {
      "id": 37,
      "parent_id": 2,
      "name": "Men",
      "is_active": true,
      "position": 3,
      "level": 2,
      "product_count": 0,
      "children_data": []
    },
    {
      "id": 3,
      "parent_id": 2,
      "name": "Gear",
      "is_active": true,
      "position": 4,
      "level": 2,
      "product_count": 46,
      "children_data": []
    },
    {
      "id": 9,
      "parent_id": 2,
      "name": "Training",
      "is_active": true,
      "position": 5,
      "level": 2,
      "product_count": 6,
      "children_data": []
    },
    {
      "id": 7,
      "parent_id": 2,
      "name": "Collections",
      "is_active": false,
      "position": 5,
      "level": 2,
      "product_count": 13,
      "children_data": []
    },
    {
      "id": 55,
      "parent_id": 2,
      "name": "Promotions",
      "is_active": false,
      "position": 6,
      "level": 2,
      "product_count": 0,
      "children_data": []
    },
    {
      "id": 63,
      "parent_id": 2,
      "name": "Sale",
      "is_active": true,
      "position": 6,
      "level": 2,
      "product_count": 0,
      "children_data": []
    }
  ]
}

Create an integration in Magento 2 programmatically

Magento 2 manages integrations under the Magento_Integration module.

By using Magento\Integration\Model\ConfigBasedIntegrationManager class, we can create an integration with XML configuration files. It takes three main steps for getting this process done.

Creating a skeleton Module

Step 1. Create the module file structure.

Like any other of Magento 2 custom modules, The module for integration should be placed under magento_base_dir/app/code/{{vendor_name}}/{{module_name}} or under the magento_base_dir/vendors/ folder. In this example, we will place source code under. To make it simple, let’s create under /app/code/{{vendor_name}}/{{module_name}} by running these commands.

cd 
mkdir -p app/code//{{vendor_name}}/{{module_name}}/etc/integration
mkdir -p app/code//{{vendor_name}}/{{module_name}}/Setup

Note: In this post, we are going to use Beehexa as vendor and IntegrationManager as the module name.

Step 2. Define your module configuration file etc/module.xml

The etc/module.xml the file provides basic information about the module. Change directories to the etc directory and create the module.xml file. We must specify values for the following following information:

• Module name
• Module version
• Dependencies

Because in the install script that we are going to add later in this tutorial, we call a class name Magento\Integration\Model\ConfigBasedIntegrationManager. We have to add Magento_Integration

a dependency for our custom integration creator.

Step 3. Add your module’s composer.json file

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. You must create a composer.json file for your module so that Composer can install and update the libraries your module relies on. Then place the composer.json file in the module’s root directory.

{
    "name": "beehexa/integrationmanager",
    "description": "",
    "type": "magento2-module",
    "version": "1.0.1",
    "license": [
      "MIT"
    ],
    "autoload": {
      "psr-4": {
        "Beehexa\\IntegrationManager\\": ""
      },
      "files": [
        "registration.php"
      ]
    }
  }

For more information, see Create a component from the official Magento development documentation.

Step 4. Create a registration.php file

The registration.php registers the module with the Magento system. It must be placed in the module’s root directory.

Define the integration

Your module can optionally provide values in the configuration file so that the integration can be automatically pre-configured with default values. To enable this feature, update the config.xml file in the etc/integration directory.

	


   
       hexasync@beehexa.com
       
       
   

 

Install the module to run the setup scripts

After that, run the commands those you must be familiar with for installing the module and having the setup script creating integration for you.

bin/magento setup:upgrade
bin/magento setup:di:compile
bin/magento cache:clean

And here is the output when we visit Systems -> Extensions -> Integrations

Click on the integration, we can see the detail as we configured in the etc/integration/config.xml

and API resources granted to the testIntegration2 as we created in our etc/integration/api.xml

If you activate the testIntegration2, your external application can start accessing the resources we configured as in the picture above. The way it works is similar to what we did with the integration we created manually above.

There is an important part of working with Magento Integration is to understand how Magento and the external application handle OAuth communications but it will be another post. I just hope my blog helps you clearly understand what is Integration in Magento and the 2 ways you can create it.