Webhooks

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Introduction

Web Hooks are a great way to integrate Hornbill with other applications that are accessible over the internet. Web Hooks can send information from Hornbill to another application as soon as a record is updated, rather than relying on scheduled imports or the continually polling for data.

A web hook is the opposite to an API call, a web hook is a call over HTTP from your Hornbill instance to a web endpoint of your choosing. Most application actions on a Hornbill instance can trigger an action-specific event when an action is performed. Hornbill can be configured to call to a web end point passing the action-specific data to the web service being invoked. This is a very powerful mechanism that enables true, near real-time integration with other business systems.

Basic Information

• Name - Unique name used to indentify the Web Hook in the list. This is a mandatory field.
• Description - Enter a description to allow others to understand the use of this particular Web Hook
• Application - Select the Hornbill application where the event is coming from
• Event Source - Select the event
• Enabled - Enable or disable this Web Hook

Web Hook Target

• URL

The target URL for the Web Hook. This will typically be a php or asp page that you have created

• Payload Format

This defines the format of how you would like the data to be received. Choose from XML or JSON

• Post Mode

• Asynchronous - Fire and forget. Don't worry about the response
• Synchronous - If a response code other than 200 is returned from the webhook URL then the API call will fail. The response body will be returned as the error message if the content type is text/plain.
• Synchronous Critical - If there is no response a 200 error is returned from the webhook URL and the API call will fail

HTTP Protocol Information

Your web hook should accept a POST verb with either XML or JSON content as the payload (set by webhook properties). For pre-action hooks such as OnCreate, OnUpdate and OnDelete asyncCritical types it is possible to send an error message from your web hook back to the user's screen. To do this simply respond with a 403 response code, set the Content-type: header to text/plain and the actual text message you want to return to the users display in the response body, the response body should be returned as UTF-8 encoded bytes if non-ascii content is requited.

Testing and Examples

RequestBin Test

The [RequestBin] web site is a third party tool that generates a temporary URL that allows you to collect requests made to it and lets you inspect them in a human-friendly way. Use RequestBin to see what your HTTP client is sending from Hornbill.

As RequestBin is a third party tool, Hornbill is not responsible for the availability, quality, security, or any other aspect of this tool

After creating your Web Hook in Hornbill test it using the following steps:

Create a Request Bin

1. Go to the web site http://requestb.in
2. Click on the Create a RequestBin button
3. Copy the Bin URL and save it under the URL field in the Web Hook target section of your Hornbill Webhook configuration.
4. Create a new Request in Hornbill Service Manager
5. Refresh the RequestBin page
6. The information from your request should be visible in the format you configured.

Example Integration

An example to reading the JSON payload from a webhook can be found on GitHub - The code is avialable for use under the Hornbill Community Licence.