How to Connect Flowise AI Agents to Live Paylocity Data via CData Connect AI

Integrate Flowise AI with the CData Connect AI MCP Server to enable agents to securely query and act on live data without replication.

Flowise AI is an open-source, no-code tool for building AI workflows and custom agents visually. Its drag-and-drop interface allows you to integrate large language models (LLMs) with APIs, databases, and external systems effortlessly.

CData Connect AI enables real-time connectivity to over 350+ enterprise data sources. Through its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, CData Connect AI bridges Flowise agents with live Paylocity securely and efficiently, no data replication required. By combining Flowise AI's intuitive agent builder with CData's MCP integration, users can create agents capable of fetching, analyzing, and acting upon live Paylocity data directly within Flowise AI workflows.

This guide shows you how to connect Flowise AI to CData Connect AI MCP, set up credentials, and enable your agents to query live Paylocity data in real time.

Step 1: Configure Paylocity Connectivity for Flowise

Connectivity to Paylocity from Flowise AI is made possible through CData Connect AI's Remote MCP Server. To interact with Paylocity data from Flowise AI, we start by creating and configuring a Paylocity connection in CData Connect AI.

  1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
  2. Select Paylocity from the Add Connection panel
  3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Paylocity.

    Set the following to establish a connection to Paylocity:

    • RSAPublicKey: Set this to the RSA Key associated with your Paylocity, if the RSA Encryption is enabled in the Paylocity account.

      This property is required for executing Insert and Update statements, and it is not required if the feature is disabled.

    • UseSandbox: Set to true if you are using sandbox account.
    • CustomFieldsCategory: Set this to the Customfields category. This is required when IncludeCustomFields is set to true. The default value for this property is PayrollAndHR.
    • Key: The AES symmetric key(base 64 encoded) encrypted with the Paylocity Public Key. It is the key used to encrypt the content.

      Paylocity will decrypt the AES key using RSA decryption.
      It is an optional property if the IV value not provided, The driver will generate a key internally.

    • IV: The AES IV (base 64 encoded) used when encrypting the content. It is an optional property if the Key value not provided, The driver will generate an IV internally.

    Connect Using OAuth Authentication

    You must use OAuth to authenticate with Paylocity. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Paylocity using the browser. For more information, refer to the OAuth section in the Help documentation.

    The Pay Entry API

    The Pay Entry API is completely separate from the rest of the Paylocity API. It uses a separate Client ID and Secret, and must be explicitly requested from Paylocity for access to be granted for an account. The Pay Entry API allows you to automatically submit payroll information for individual employees, and little else. Due to the extremely limited nature of what is offered by the Pay Entry API, we have elected not to give it a separate schema, but it may be enabled via the UsePayEntryAPI connection property.

    Please be aware that when setting UsePayEntryAPI to true, you may only use the CreatePayEntryImportBatch & MergePayEntryImportBatchgtable stored procedures, the InputTimeEntry table, and the OAuth stored procedures. Attempts to use other features of the product will result in an error. You must also store your OAuthAccessToken separately, which often means setting a different OAuthSettingsLocation when using this connection property.

  4. Click Save & Test
  5. Navigate to the Permissions tab and update user-based permissions

Once the connection is established, Paylocity data is now accessible in CData Connect AI and ready to be used with MCP enabled tools.

Add a Personal Access Token

A Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI from Flowise AI. It is best practice to create a separate PAT for each integration to maintain granular access control.

  1. Click the gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open Settings
  2. On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT
  3. Give the PAT a descriptive name and click Create
  4. Copy the token when displayed and store it securely. It will not be shown again

With the Paylocity connection configured and a PAT generated, Flowise AI can now connect to Paylocity data through the CData MCP Server.

Step 2: Configure Connect AI credentials in Flowise AI

Log in to Flowise AI workspace to set up the integration.

Add OpenAI credentials

  1. Navigate to Credentials and choose Add Credential
  2. Select OpenAI API from the dropdown
  3. Provide a name (e.g., OpenAI_Key) and paste the API key

Add the PAT variable

  1. Navigate to Variables and Add Variable
  2. Set Variable Name (e.g., PAT), choose Static as type, and set the Value to Base64-encoded username:PAT
  3. Click Add to save the variable

Step 3: Build the agent in Flowise AI

  1. Go to Agent Flows, select Add New
  2. Click the "+" icon to add a new node and choose Agent and drag the agent to the workflow
  3. Connect the Start node to the Agent node

Configure agent settings

Double-click on the Agent node and fill in the details:

  • Model: select ChatOpenAI or preferred model (e.g., gpt-4o-mini)
  • Connect Credential: Select OpenAI API key credential which was created earlier
  • Streaming: Enabled

Add the custom MCP tool

  1. Under Tools, click Add Tool and choose Custom MCP
  2. Fill in the JSON parameters as shown below:
 
{
  "url": "https://mcp.cloud.cdata.com/mcp",
  "headers": {
    "Authorization": "Basic {{$vars.PAT}}"
  }
}

Click the refresh icon to load available MCP actions. Once actions are listed, now Flowise agent is successfully connected to CData Connect AI MCP.

Step 4: Test and query live Paylocity data in Flowise

  1. Open the Chat tab in Flowise
  2. Type a query such as "Show top 10 records from Paylocity data table"
  3. Observe that responses are fetched in real time via the CData Connect AI MCP connection

With the workflow run completed, Flowise demonstrates successful retrieval of Salesforce data through the CData Connect AI MCP server, with the MCP Client node providing the ability to ask questions, retrieve records, and perform actions on the data.

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