Webhooks and Data Loaders

Enhance the capabilities of your bot by incorporating webhooks and data loaders. These features allow your bot to interact with external services through HTTP calls and fetch dynamic data to enrich user interactions.

Webhooks

Configure webhooks in your bot to trigger HTTP calls to external REST APIs. The webhook object allows you to specify the URL, method, headers, and data payload for the HTTP request.

Webhook Object Elements

• url (required): The URL to send the webhook request.
• method (optional, default: ‘GET’): The HTTP method for the webhook request (e.g., ‘GET’, ‘POST’, ‘PUT’).
• headers (optional): Key-value pairs of strings representing HTTP request headers for the webhook.
• data (optional): Key-value pairs of strings representing the JSON payload for the HTTP request body.

Example:

handlers:
  - on:
      message: test-webhook
    reply:
      - message:
          text: Ok
      - webhook:
          url: https://example.com/webhook
          method: POST
          headers:
            Authorization: "Bearer ${secret.apikey}"
          data:
            name: "${state.name}"
            user_id: "${user.id}"
            source: test-webhook

In this example, a POST request is sent to https://example.com/webhook with specified headers and data payload.

Data Loaders

Data loaders enable your bot to fetch external data via REST calls and use it within message templates. Fetch external data during user interactions to provide dynamic and personalized responses.

Data Loader Object Elements

• method (optional, default: ‘GET’): The HTTP request method for the data loader (e.g., ‘GET’, ‘POST’, ‘PUT’).
• url (required): The external URL to fetch data from.
• headers (optional): Key-value pairs of strings representing HTTP request headers for the data loader.

Example:

bot:
  handlers:
  - on:
      message:
        command: start
    data:
      fetch:
        method: GET
        url: "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1"
    reply:
      - message:
          text: 'id: {{ index .Data "userId"}}, title: {{ .Data.title }}'
          template: go

In this example, the bot fetches JSON data from https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1 and uses Go templating to render it into the message text.

Webhooks and data loaders open up possibilities for integrating your bot with external services, making interactions more dynamic.