How to set up webhooks

Transcript

Webhooks can be one of the most powerful features you can add to your Adobe Acrobat Sign workflow. In this video, I’ll show you a few ways you can create an Acrobat Sign webhook. But before I do that, I’ll give you a quick explanation of what a webhook is. Then I’ll show you how to create a webhook via Adobe Acrobat Sign web UI, and how to create one with Adobe Acrobat Sign. Rest API v6 swagger a webhook is basically just a Post request that is sent to a specific URL. That URL is set up to receive the body of the Post request and process it when there is an event occurrence. On the receiving end, you create a URL that is set up to receive the Post request. This endpoint would receive an event object in JSON or XML. In this video I’m using JSON. Now, some of you who are familiar with API callbacks might be wondering what the difference is between an API callback versus a webhook. Let me explain it like this. With a callback URL, Adobe Acrobat sign says hey x, y, z app I have your phone number, the callback URL, but my outgoing facility is not working, so you will need to give me a call every time when you need the data. This is known as the polling method with a webhook URL. Adobe Acrobat Sign says hey x, y, z app. I have your phone number with me and I also have an unlimited incoming and outgoing facility. So you don’t need to call me. Instead, I will give you a call on your phone number when I have data for you. You just sit tight and don’t worry. This is known as the push method. So a webhook is used to be notified when certain events take place. Instead of constantly asking what is happening, like I explained with the callback polling method, once the webhook is configured and saved. Adobe Acrobat Sign will push a new JSON object to the defined URL every time the trigger event is trapped. Now, ongoing manipulation of the webhook is required unless you want to change the event trigger criteria or the Json payload. Now let’s learn how to create a webhook from Acrobat sign UI. To do this, we will need to be an admin or group admin of the Adobe Acrobat sign account. One of the first things you will need is a webhook tester. I have a link on this page you can use with a webhook tester. You can create a URL that listens for any incoming post, get requests. It’s even real time. Feel free to use your own preferred webhook site like Azure or AWS, or check out other options in the links on this page on the Webhook Tester site. We can generate a random URL. Since I will need this URL, we will copy it and also bookmark this page. We will need to go back to this page in an upcoming step. Okay, now that we have the URL, we need to insert the JSON. In this case, the element we will be adding to the JSON is the Adobe Acrobat Sign client ID that I’m showing onscreen. Here’s how to do that. On the same page, click edit. When the edit box is open, just key in the JSON body like I have here.

Now log in to Adobe Acrobat Sign Web UI and go to the Account tab, then webhooks and click on the plus to create the webhook. Once I am here, I can provide the name scope webhook URL that we copied previously. Then we can select unsubscribe to the events and notification parameters we would like. Now that that’s done, it’s safe. Great. We have successfully registered. We are ready to test the webhook. To do this we’re going to send an agreement from Acrobat. Sign to keep things flowing along. I’ll just select the template we can select from other file locations as well. We will click on send. Great. It has been sent. Now we go back to the webhook tester we bookmarked. Here we can see our webhook in action. It sometimes takes a little bit so be patient. But pretty soon we will see the post and get call. If you want to see the details about the post events, you can click on it. This will bring up all sorts of useful information. Notice that under the header section we see the client ID we entered earlier. You might be wondering why I have three post events. Well, in each one, if we scroll down we can see that they are different events. In this one we can see that it’s for the agreement created event. Then if I go to this other one, I can see that it is for the agreement action requested. And this last post event has the metadata for the agreement email viewed. Okay, great. Looks like everything is working as planned and we will keep getting post events moving forward. Now let’s walk through how we can create a webhook via Acrobat Sign Rest v6 Swagger application. In this case, we can just edit our current webhook. Just click edit and key in the Json body so you can see it more clearly. I have the Adobe Sign client ID for rest swagger on the screen.

Now that our webhook tester is ready, we can set up the next part in your Adobe Sign account. Go to the account item, then go to the Adobe Sign API section and launch Adobe Sign Rest API v6 Swagger online by clicking on rest API methods documentation. This opens up the swagger documentation. Now all we need to do is scroll down and find the webhook section. Once we find it, click on it to reveal the post webhooks. This will be where we can begin generating the Bearer Access token. To do this, click on the OAuth Access Token button. Then click select Webhook Underscore right to pull up a few options. We need to do this for the account. So once we have that selected we can click authorize. Now that we have that we go to minimal model schema. And this will pop up some code. Just click on it and that will set it as a parameter value. Let’s set the name of the webhook and set up the remaining parameters. We can find a helpful guide by clicking on model and then clicking Webhook Info. Here we can see all of the options for scope. It’s really easy to just copy and paste from here. We also need to do this for the state, and since we want to see all of the agreement events, I find that option and plug it in. Okay, the last thing we need to do is add our URL. We have that copied. So we just paste it in and we are ready to test. To do this we click on try it out. We know that our webhook has successfully registered. Since we can see the ID here. Then we can hop over to our webhook tester. Here we see that a Get request has been posted and if we click on it, we can see the details. Let’s test it a bit further by sending a document. I’ll do that off screen so we aren’t wasting time watching me. Send a document from Acrobat sign. A few seconds after I hit send the post request start coming in and we can click on any of these events to see more details. Great work! Oh, one last thing to point out. These webhooks we built can also be seen by going back to Acrobat sign, then to the account tab webhooks, where we can see all of the active webhooks, one from Acrobat Sign and the other from REST Swagger. I’m excited to see what you do with webhooks in Acrobat Sign. And please remember that on this page I have other resources and links that will be a great start to unlocking the potential of your Acrobat Sign workflows.