About the External Database Service Plugin

As an external database service plugin provider, 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 accessible to Wix sites.
Allow Wix site owners to store their business data in an external database.

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 hosted directly on Wix, as well as for external databases hosted outside the Wix ecosystem.

To allow Wix Data to communicate with external data sources, implement this External Database service plugin and make it accessible to Wix on a public, https URL.

Note: Wix offers several out-of-the-box external database adaptors for common platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). If the external data source is hosted on one of these platforms, consider using the appropriate adaptor.

Before you begin:

It's important to note the following points before starting to code:

This service plugin isn't yet supported by the CLI.

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.

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 endpoint descriptions specify the type of request Wix Data sends to each endpoint, and what type of response each endpoint is expected to return.

When the endpoints are implemented, you can either:

Create and configure a Wix app to make your service available for integration with one or more sites.
Use the External Database Connections API with connectionType set to WIX_SERVICE_PLUGIN to integrate your service with a single site.

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.

Create a Wix app

Note: Instead of creating an app, you can connect your service directly to a single site using the External Database Connections API.

To make your service available for integration with multiple sites, create and configure a Wix app:

Create an app in your Wix Studio workspace.
Go to Extensions in your app's dashboard.
Click Create Extension.
Find and select External Database Provider and click Create.
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.
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.

Name	Type	Description
`namespace`	String	Required. A prefix for all the collections your application retrieves. It must be identical to your app namespace.
`uriConfig`	Object	The URI configuration object.
`uriConfig.baseUri`	String	Required. Base URI where your service is deployed. Wix Data uses this URI to call your service's methods.
`componentName`	String	A unique name for this component. This is an internal name that appears in the app dashboard only.

For example:

Copy

Terminology

Term	Definition
Collection	A schema that determines the structure of data items to be stored. The schema defines the fields each item contains and the data type of each field.
Item	A single data entry in a collection.
External Database	A database hosted by an external service outside of Wix.
External Database Service Provider	A 3rd-party service that implements an interface to allow Wix Data to interact with an external database.

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