You can connect to any tool that has an API with Tines. API is an abbreviation for Application Programming Interface. APIs serve as intermediaries that facilitate communication between two applications. In Tines, we typically use API as shorthand for web APIs involving HTTP requests between web servers. You can even build your own APIs with Tines.

Actions are the building blocks of all stories in Tines. They emit events to other actions in your story. Once you drag an action onto the Storyboard in Tines, you have started building your first story in Tines.

The action bar is the small menu of options that appears when you select an action on your Storyboard. You can do things like run your event, test your event, and see event data for that action.

You can build apps with Tines by configuring an exchange of user input and background automation. Think of the app’s backend as the Story run, while the user-facing page as the front end.

Any time a user changes any piece of data in your Tines tenant, through the UI or API, it is automatically captured as an audit log. You can view your audit logs via your tenant admin menu in the top left of your dashboard when you click the Tines logo.

A tab in the properties panel used to configure your actions.

With Cases in Tines, you can work together, comment, and track activity for any alert or incident.

With change control in Tines, you have two working spaces for each Story; test and live. These environments run independently of each other without any interference. You can enable Change control in the manage dropdown menu above your Storyboard. When your story is ready, admins can push story changes from test to live.

Authentication keys for the various systems and services you connect with Tines. Your credentials are saved in Tines, and accessible via the team they are saved within.

You can access a list of quick actions by using command+K in Tines.

A mode of the event transformation action. Deduplicate mode is available in any event transform action. You can specify a field in an incoming event and only emit the event if that field contains a unique value.

A mode of the event transformation action. With delay mode, you can deliberately pause a story for a set number of seconds before emitting an event. More in our docs here.

The descriptive text you can provide about your story, action, page, record, or other story components.

A private place to build stories on your own before moving them to a team when you’re ready.

An editor in your team is a user that has read and write permissions to most objects across a team, but they cannot manage member access to the team or perform destructive actions. This role is helpful for most users who need the ability to create, edit, and run Stories in Tines.

Actions, tools, or templates you can pull onto the Storyboard to begin a workflow.

One of the eight action types in Tines. Use the event transformation action type to modify and transform incoming events or data for further downstream processing. It has several modes: message-only mode, extract mode, explode mode, deduplicate mode, delay mode, implode mode, and throttle mode.

Structured data sent between actions within your stories. Every time an action runs, it produces an event that describes the outcome or result of the action. This event is passed to other actions connected downstream. More about events here.

A mode of the event transformation action. Extract mode allows you to use regular expressions to extract text from fields in incoming events.

View a list of your favorite stories in your tenant. Favorites are available in the top left menu in your dashboard.

Any element or connected set of elements on the Storyboard.

Stay organized by sorting your stories into folders in your teams.

Just like in spreadsheets, formulas allow you to transform data in Tines. You can reference event data from upstream actions or other data sources like resources and then use one of our 150+ built-in functions. For example, to count the number of items in an array, you could use a formula like `SIZE(upstream_action.array)`.

Organize and categorize related actions in a story together. Groups enable a better organization of complex stories by extracting well-defined branches of a story into a group.

One of the eight action types in Tines. With this action type you can send/fetch data to/from any API on the web.

The primary data that you send over in a http request. This is commonly known as "request body" outside of Tines.

These are modes of the event transformation action. With explode mode, you can specify a field in an incoming Event that contains an array, and Tines will emit individual Events for each element of the array.

With implode mode, you can collect and reassemble a previously exploded array into a single event. Some examples include reassembling an array of 'exploded' URLs from a previous action in the story or consolidating API paging requests into a single event by setting the size to the number of pages available.

You can import a story into Tines in two ways: selecting a pre-made story from our Story Library or importing a story file from your computer via the import button at the top of your Tines Dashboard.

You can connect to third-party tools via Tines. This is sometimes referred to as an integration (aka connection).

A place to do upfront formula calculations before an action runs. Then, when it runs, you can refer to the results of those calculations here.

A tab inside the properties panel to the right of your Storyboard. Here you can spot errors and analyze logs generated by your actions.

There is the option to lock a story in the top right corner of the screen. Anyone viewing the story then needs to unlock it in order to configure actions or edit connections.

A mode of the event transformation action. Use message-only to produce a new piece of data and emit it as an event for use downstream. You can use formulas to refer to upstream event data, and even use the loop configuration option to iterate over a list of data to transform it.

You can turn on monitoring for your entire story. It will notify you when any action fails. You can also turn it on and configure it for individual actions.

Add annotations or comments to provide additional information or instructions within your story.

A web page you can make using Tines. Your end users can use it to fill out forms or consume information. You can build powerful apps with pages; they can display information from events, a workflow to end-users, and pass data from users to actions via forms.

When creating a page in Tines, you can choose from a list of input fields for your end-users to interact with. These include long text, short text, date, URL, email, file upload, and more.

When creating a Page in Tines, you can choose from a list of display elements that make up your page. These include title, divider, image, rich text, map and table.

You can organize and share visual preferences between your pages with themes.

Themes store the logo, color, and width settings for a page so they can be applied to other pages. You can create a new theme by opening an existing page and clicking on the theme dropdown.

You can add a pill to the content of certain actions in Tines. Pills allow you to insert dynamic expressions into text.

There is a properties panel for your story, and another for each action item in your story. From the properties panel you can access everything from the story name, tags, credentials, to the story description. At an individual action level you can access the build pane, the status pane, the logs pane, and in the case of a HTTP request, the summary pane.

One of the eight action types in Tines. The receive email Action emits events when it detects new emails on an IMAP server or when emails are sent to a uniquely generated email address hosted by Tines.Trigger workflows based on receiving emails or perform actions on incoming email messages.

This story list is organized by your most recently edited stories in your tenant.

Capture and store data or information encountered or generated during the execution of your stories. You can drag a record onto your Storyboard to capture the data at specific points in your story.

Tines reporting provides an overview of your Tines tenant and action performance. Reports include, story usage, time-saved per story, most activity by, story, action, credential, and resource.

Manage and organize reusable pieces of data like text, objects, arrays and files for use across multiple stories.

You can schedule your story to run at a specific time. Select the first action (or group) in your story, then go to status, and set your schedule there.

One of the eight action types in Tines. Automate sending emails as part of your workflow processes.

One of the eight action types in Tines. Route events or data to other stories for further processing or analysis.

A tab in the properties panel where you can monitor and manage the status of your story or action or page.

A collection of actions connected together to achieve a specific automation goal or objective. It is the building format of a Tines workflow that may include multiple independent units.

The canvas on which you plan for and build stories in Tines. This is where most of your work will occur.

A repository or collection of reusable stories or workflow templates that can be shared and reused.

A Story run allows you to trace the exact path an event took through a Story. It contains the Actions and their emitted events allowing you to easily troubleshoot and benchmark your automation stories.

Tags are used in a few ways in Tines. You can assign tags to categorize and organize your stories in the story library, or your cases; for easier searching and filtering. There is also a tags feature used in formulas.

With teams in Tines, you can organize your users, credentials, resources, and stories. Team members will only be able to access the configuration items of teams that they are a part of unless they are a tenant owner.

If you have multiple teams in a tenant, the tenant owner can provision story limits by team. You can find this option in your tenant admin menu.

Templates are pre-configured actions or groups of actions that you can use straight out of the box with Tines. You can browse and select them directly from the Templates menu to the left of your Storyboard.

When you sign up to Tines you and your team are organized together in a shared workspace known as a tenant where you can collaborate together.

Tenant owners can perform actions on any object, regardless of the team that owns it (users who are not tenant owners can only perform actions on objects owned by a team they are a member of).

A mode of the event transformation action. Allow events to be emitted at a consistent, limited rate. Throttle mode helps you to respect rate limits when interacting with 3rd party APIs. This logic is applied to all events regardless of which story run they are from.

In addition to the eight action types available in the menu next to your Storyboard, you can also drag on one of 4 tools. They are; group, page, note, and Record.

One of the eight action types in Tines. With a trigger action type you can define the rules or conditions that determine what happens in your story. The Trigger Action compares the contents of a field from an incoming event with predefined rules. When the rules match, an event is triggered.

Rules determine when and how trigger actions should fire.

An individual in Tines with access to view, edit, or manage stories and/or the tenant.

Story-versioning allows teams to back up, inspect, clone, export, and restore any workflow. You can access version history via the clock icon at the top-right corner of your Storyboard.

As a viewer, you have read-only permission across a team. You can view, but not edit, objects in a team. This role is useful for situations where a colleague or auditor needs oversight or understanding of an automated workflow, without the ability to alter it – or even accidentally break it.

Value types are options for creating the payload in certain types of actions (like Send to story and Event transformation. A value can be text, formula, number, true/false, null, an object or an array. You can learn more here.

One of the eight action types in Tines. A webhook enables communication between two applications in real-time. To create a new webhook, simply drag it onto your Storyboard to create a URL which can receive HTTP data.

Capture and process the responses received from external systems via webhooks.