After creating an environment and fetching its business applications configuration, you are now ready to explore and search these configuration elements, see how they relate to each other and answer questions about the impact a certain change may have on other areas of your configuration, e.g . where a certain field is being used, which workflow is using a certain email template, etc.

📘 Elements are the basic building block of information in the Salto ecosystem, they represent everything we know about the configuration of the applications we manage.

When Salto runs a fetch operation, it communicates with the upstream business applications via their APIs and translates the information it receives to Salto configuration elements.
Salto configuration elements may represent any configuration aspect of the application, e.g. custom object, custom field, layout/form definition, email template, workflow etc.

When Salto detects a configuration element that relates to another one, it generates a ‘Salto reference’, representing this information. This detection allows users to identify dependencies throughout their configuration. We commonly refer to this use case as ‘Impact Analysis’.

In some cases, Salto can detect references across more than one application, e.g., a Workato recipe connecting a Salesforce field and a NetSuite one. This detection allows users to generate cross application impact analysis insights.

A certain configuration element may be linked to a ‘static file’ containing additional textual or binary information related to that element, e.g. code, email template, image (icon) etc.

There are two basic types of elements in Salto, Instances and Types:

Salto configuration elements also have a textual representation that is based on Salto's NaCl language.
Fetched configuration elements are translated to the NaCl format and stored in text files containing a representation of the configuration, relations to other elements and links to static files.

Maintaining the business application configuration in textual files allows Salto users to:

Use the "Explore" tab to explore and search your configuration data.

Each element has a unique Salto Element ID. This ID, generated by Salto, is guaranteed to be unique in every environment and consistent across environments.

Element IDs are generated according to various rules and criteria, and can be very long.

In addition, elements have a more "user friendly" name, an alias, which is used when exploring and searching your environment. This is the name you'll see in the explore tree and the element title when viewing its contents.

You can see Element IDs by hover over the "ID" icon which appears in the explore tab, or in the element content tab itself.

For example, this element's alias is "Date Picker", while its element ID is much longer:

When you use the search bar, Salto will search both element IDs and aliases. This helps you quickly locate the element you're looking for. When Salto locates an element according to its Element ID, you'll see the ID icon highlighted in yellow.

With RegEx (Regular expression) based search you can save time by performing a more powerful search once instead of combining multiple searches. To enable RegEx based search make sure to click the .* icon on the right side of your search window.

Once enabled, you can search for cases such as finding all of the appearances of either the apiName or the externalName of a certain field across your configuration data. For that purpose you can use the following search query in the 'Content' tab: (api|external)Name

Another example for using RegEx based search might be finding all of the appearances of fields starting with Account across your configuration data, yet not objects or anything else. For that purpose you can use the following search query in the 'Content' tab: Account\w.*\. See an explanation about the syntax of this query below

In case an element you are looking for does not exist in search, it might be because your app connection configuration is excluding it.

Each application connection can be configured to control the scope of the configuration data that is being fetched into Salto. To learn more about app connection configurations and how to include or exclude types, check out this guide.

In case your application connection is configured properly and you still miss an element in search, let us know.

Displays the content of the selected element, file or content search

When inspecting elements, you can also view their references to learn about their relationships with other elements and identify dependencies on other parts of your configuration. This is very useful when performing impact analysis in order to understand how a change in a certain element may influence other parts of your configuration.

To view the references of an element, open it and click on "View References".

Alternatively, you can view references also by right clicking over any element in the Content view or by hovering over an element in the Elements tab and clicking the ‘...’ menu.

References are grouped by their type. Expand a type from the references list to see all of the references of that type for the chosen element. Clicking on a reference will display its content.

You may want to review a specific Salto element directly in your business application. To do so, click on ‘Open in App’ via:

This will work only with public elements or private ones, as long as the user who created the private element is the one clicking on 'Open in App'. For example, a saved search in NetSuite.

Continue to our step-by-step video guides, for real examples: