What are card connections in Application Composer?

In AWS Application Composer, a connection between two cards is visually displayed by a line. These lines represent event-driven relationships within your application.

Connections between cards

How you connect cards together varies depending on the card type. Each enhanced card has at least one connector port. To connect them, you simply select one connector port and drag it to the port of another card, and Application Composer will connect the two resources or display a message stating this configuration isn’t supported.

As seen above, lines between enhanced component cards are solid. Conversely, standard IaC resource cards (also referred to as standard component cards) do not have connector ports. For these cards, you must specify these event-driven relationships in your application's template, and Application Composer will automatically detect their connections and visualize them with a dotted line between your cards.

To learn more, see the sections below.

Connections between enhanced component cards

In Application Composer, a connection between two enhanced component cards is visually displayed by a solid line. These lines represent event-driven relationships within your application.

To connect two cards, click on a port from one card and drag it onto a port on another card.

Note

Standard IaC resource cards do not have connector ports. For these cards, you must specify their event-driven relationships in your application's template, and Application Composer will automatically detect their connections and visualize them with a dotted line between your cards.

For more information, see Connect cards.

Connections to and from standard IaC resource cards

All AWS CloudFormation resources are available to use as standard IaC resource cards from the Resources palette. When you drag a standard IaC resource card onto the canvas, a standard IaC resource card becomes a standard component card, and this prompts Application Composer to create a starting template for your resource in your application.

For more information, see Standard IaC resource cards (standard component cards).