Crystallize Apps
“Crystallize apps” have been released! We are pleased to announce that you can now build an “Application” that can be injected into the main Crystallize App.
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Apps are custom external applications you link from the Crystallize App via a URL. If we don’t offer some functionality that you need, you can build it yourself or find it elsewhere and allow your tenant’s users to access it within our UI.
An example might be import and export tools designed for your specific business needs. Or if you want to have custom views or dashboards for your data. You can easily imagine a cockpit of your orders, customers, and buttons to trigger specific actions.
Before Crystallize Apps, you need to send your users somewhere else to do such things. Not anymore; you can now streamline their experience and provide a much better one.
In a nutshell, a Crystallize app is an Iframe on steroids. You must host your app so the main Crystallize App will call in an Iframe. A signature will be passed to that iframe URL so your app can be sure this is called from Crystallize.
To verify the signature, you need to read this: https://crystallize.com/learn/developer-guides/api-overview/signature-verification
The signature is a JWT token that will also provide you with some context, like the tenant id, identifier, the authenticated user, and other things.
On top of that, we are providing a communication channel called: app-signal to enable your app to perform actions on the main Crystallize App.
Actions like:
- Navigate to specific pages
- Toggle menus
- Change the language
And more to come, look at https://www.npmjs.com/package/@crystallize/app-signal
To get started, the documentation is here: https://crystallize.com/learn/user-guides/getting-started/apps,
And the hello world app is here: https://github.com/CrystallizeAPI/hello-world-comics-app
One crucial thing is apps are not plug-ins or mods, you cannot change the main Crystallize App. They can’t be used to modify the Crystallize App, but if that is what you are looking for: Plugins will arrive soon!
And at the same time, we are also polishing a design system that you can use to build apps that look like they are fully integrated into the UI.
Last but not least, we will provide Open Source apps that we will host for you, and if we see some of our open-source apps used more than others, we will simply integrate them into the product by default!