About the External Database Service Plugin

As an external database service plugin provider (formerly SPI), you can create a service that allows Wix sites to access and manage data stored anywhere, as if it were hosted natively on Wix. By implementing this service plugin, your service can:

• Make external business data available to Wix sites.
• Make an external database available to Wix site owners to store their business data.

Learn more about service plugins.

Managing data with Wix

Wix offers a variety of data management solutions to accommodate common user needs at different scales. This includes support for internal databases that are hosted directly on Wix, as well as external databases hosted outside the Wix ecosystem.

You can store and manage data directly on Wix using the Wix Data API. Wix also supports managing data hosted on external databases. The External Database Connections API allows Wix Data to communicate with an external database as if it were hosted directly on Wix. Wix offers several out-of-the-box external database integrations for common platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure. These integrations translate Wix Data requests into the external database's protocol, and translate the response back into a format that Wix APIs can read.

To allow Wix Data to communicate with any other data source, implement the External Database service plugin.

Become an external database service provider

The External Database service plugin defines endpoints you can implement to integrate an external database with Wix. Wix Data calls these endpoints to access and manage the items and collections the external database contains. The endpoints descriptions specify what type of request Wix Data sends to each endpoint, and what type of response each endpoint is expected to return.

When the service is implemented and ready for use, you can make it available to users by creating a Wix app and configuring it with the details of your service. This tells Wix Data where your service is deployed. After installing your app on their sites, site admins can use the Wix Data APIs to access and interact with the external database as if it were hosted on Wix.

Provide basic functionality

While you aren't required to implement all the endpoints in this service plugin, make sure to implement at least the following endpoints to provide basic functionality:

• Get Capabilities: This endpoint lets Wix Data determine which capabilities are supported by the external database.
• List Collections: This endpoint enables Wix Data to view the collections stored in the external database.
• Query Data Items: This endpoint enables Wix Data to query items in an external collection.

Use Cases

Your service can accommodate many scenarios that require Wix Data to communicate with external databases. These might include:

• A business that wants to make its data available for Wix site owners.
• A Wix site owner whose data is stored in an external database and wants to query and display that data on their site.
• A Wix app developer who wants to implement ready-for-use external database integrations for specific database services.
• A growing business that wants to store its Wix collections on an external cloud service to scale as needed.

Configuration

To enable Wix Data to communicate with your service:

1. Create an app in the Wix Developers Center.

2. Select your new app and click the Extensions tab.

3. Click Create Extension.

4. Find and select External Database Provider and click Create.

5. If it has not been set before, set up an app namespace. This is a unique identifier for your app that, once set, can't be changed. It is added as a prefix to the user's external collection names.

6. Use the built-in JSON editor to provide your extension’s configuration details. Make sure to include all the required fields as they appear in the table below. Once you're done, click Save.

For example:

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Terminology