I’m building a SaaS connector and I have a question about the expected architecture.
In my test, I created a SaaS connector that returns the account/source data directly from the connector itself, without any external backend service behind it. It seems to work fine — accounts aggregate correctly and the data comes through as expected.
Before I rely on this, I’d like to check a few things with the community:
Has anyone else built a SaaS connector this way (no separate backend), and run it in production over time?
Is this a supported pattern, or is it something that happens to work today but isn’t guaranteed to keep working in future releases?
Would the recommended approach instead be to pair a SaaS connector with a CSV / flat-file connector for this kind of data?
I want to make sure I build on something stable rather than on behavior that could change. Any guidance or shared experience would be much appreciated.
Is the SaaS application you are building for a home grown SaaS solution? If you have a application that your paying for that your building the connector for you would need to use that applications api’s to pull in the data.
For example: NERM is a SaaS application. There is no backend from the licensed users prospective. In order to build out a reliable connector I would first look at the API spec for NERM. I would then look at CRUD operations and how I could design and build out each so that they are reliable and scalable.
But this is just a general look at what you want to accomplish. Your exact use case may differ. Are you able to give us some more details around the business case your trying to solve for and what application your trying to build this for? Please keep the details high level as we do not want you to share anything that could be sensitive.
It sounds like you are asking whether the SaaS connector can store the accounts itself, or if it needs to create/update accounts on a separate flat file connector. Adding a second connector to store accounts would be redundant. The custom SaaS connector works like any other SaaS connector (Entra, Google, Workday, etc.) - it reads from the source APIs and creates accounts in ISC (in the SaaS connector) as a representation of the source data.
thanks @mpotti & @MattUribe
That’s true, I’m wondering if the SaaS connector, with no backend can have its own storage, because otherwise I would need to make it act on a flat file