Your first channel

This walkthrough builds a minimal but realistic channel: an HL7 v2 listener that transforms an ADT message and posts it to an HTTP endpoint.

1. Create a project

From a workspace, create a project. The project is the folder your channel files live in, and the unit you can later export as a portable intu-dev project.

2. Add a source

Open the designer and add a source node. For HL7 v2, choose the TCP connector and set it to MLLP mode. Give it a name that will still make sense to someone else at 3am — ADT Inbound (MLLP) beats Source 1.

In the cloud, MLLP listeners terminate TLS at the gateway. In production, the listener also requires an inbound allowlist — see Sandbox, staging and production.

3. Enable the stages you need

A source has five stages, and you enable only the ones you use:

1. Preprocessor — clean up the raw payload.
2. Validator — reject structurally invalid input at the edge.
3. Filter — decide whether this message belongs in this channel.
4. Transformer — the main mapping.
5. Postprocessor — anything that must happen after the source pipeline finishes.

Each is a TypeScript module edited in a Monaco editor with type checking. See The pipeline model for what belongs where.

4. Add a destination

Add an HTTP destination and point it at the receiving endpoint. Every destination gets its own three hooks — filter, transformer and response transformer — so this destination can shape the payload differently from any other you add later.

5. Run it against a sample

Upload an HL7 ADT sample into the project’s test data, or use one of the seeded samples. On the Free plan, test data must be synthetic.

Run the stage in the browser first: the designer executes your TypeScript against the sample message in a Web Worker and shows you the output, with nothing deployed and no environment consumed.

When the mapping looks right, deploy the channel to the sandbox environment and send the sample through end to end. The trace shows the payload at every stage, so you can see exactly where a mapping went sideways.

6. Promote when you are ready

Sandbox is free and ephemeral — it shuts down after an idle timeout of 60 minutes on Free and 240 minutes on paid plans. To run continuously you need a long-running environment, which is a paid capability. See Promoting a channel to production.