“All things are difficult before they are easy.”
— Thomas Fuller
Now that we have built the Webhook Registry table and configured the associated form layout, the last thing we need to do before we move on is to set up the Test URL UI Action and the underlying code to make it work. Clicking on the Test URL button should pass the current registry record to a function in a new Script Include that will pull the URL out of the registry, POST an example JSON object to the URL, and verify the response. Since we have to reference the Script Include in the UI Action, let’s work on that first.
To create a new Script Include, navigate to System Definition -> Script Includes and then click on the New button. Since this will be a general purpose Script Include for our application, I named it WebhookRegistryUtils.
To test a URL, we will want to add a new function to our new Script Include that accepts a Webhook Registry GlideRecord as an argument and returns an Object that contains the results of the test POST. Let’s call this function testURL().
testURL: function(whrGR) {
var result = {};
var jsonObj = {message: 'This is a test posting.'};
var request = new sn_ws.RESTMessageV2();
request.setEndpoint(whrGR.getValue('url'));
request.setHttpMethod('POST');
request.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json');
request.setRequestHeader('Accept', 'application/json');
request.setRequestBody(JSON.stringify(jsonObj, null, 4));
var response = request.execute();
result.status = response.getStatusCode();
result.body = new global.JSON().decode(response.getBody());
result.error = response.haveError();
result.errorCode = response.getErrorCode();
result.errorMessage = response.getErrorMessage();
return result;
},
This code is fairly self-explanatory. The jsonObj is our test payload and the request is an empty sn_ws.RESTMessageV2 that we populate with the URL found in the registry record and the hard-coded Method of POST. The response is the result of executing the request, and then we pull all of the relevant information out of the response and use it to populate the result object, which we then return to the caller. We may end up reworking some of this when we start adding additional functionality, but this should be enough to test a URL with no authentication.
At this point, we could test out the code by writing a quick little Fix Script to grab a registry record and pass it to this function, but it might be just as easy to ahead and just make the UI Action and test it out on the form. To create the UI Action, pull up the Webhook Registry form, select Configure -> UI Actions from the hamburger menu, and then click on the New button. I named mine Test URL, checked the Form button checkbox, and put the following script in the Condition:
current.url > ''
That condition keeps the Test URL button from appearing on the form when there is no URL to test.
For the Script, I just call the testURL function in our new Script Include and then notify the user of the results. There is not much to the code, but here it is:
var wru = new WebhookRegistryUtils();
var result = wru.testURL(current);
action.setRedirectURL(current);
if (result.status == '200') {
gs.addInfoMessage('URL "' + current.url + '" was tested successfully.');
} else {
gs.addErrorMessage('URL test failed: ' + JSON.stringify(result, null, '<br/> '));
}
There is undoubtedly a much nicer way to format that failure message, but this will get the job done for now. We can always clean that up later. Right now, though, let’s push the button and see what happens! On second thought, though, we can’t really do that until we insert a record into the registry. let’s take care of that now.
Once all of the parts are in place, this entry should POST a payload to the specified URL every time there is a change to an Incident assigned to the owner. For the URL, I went out to check out Webhook.site, and was assigned that end point URL, so I threw that in there. That should be a valid webhook URL, so our first test should be successful. Once we prove that, we can mangle up the URL and hit it again to see what a failure looks like. But first things first — let’s see if we can make it work with a real URL.
So far, so good! Real quick, before we try out the bad one, let’s pop over to Webhook.site and see if there is any evidence that we ran this test. Oh, look — there is!
That’s actually a pretty cool little tool. That’s going to be quite handy for this particular adventure. I like it. Now, let’s try out one that we know will fail.
Well, that seems to work as well. So now we have our first table and related form, the beginnings of our Script Include and a handy UI Action. From here, we can work on the My Webhooks Portal Widget, or we can start building out the process that sends out the POSTs to the qualifying destinations. That’s nothing that we need to decide today, though; we can figure that all out next time.
