Outlook webhooks

PatrickIgnoto

@Product Dean and I wanted to get a second opinion on using Outlook webhooks on platform.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/change-notifications-delivery-webhooks?tabs=http

It seems like you need to set an expiry date on the webhook and that it can only be a few days long. So what I've done is that I have a scheduled workflow update the expiry date by one day everyday using the PATCH API call: Link to WF

I've set up my webhook workflow to check for validationToken in params, If it is present then it will send the validationToken and end the workflow at that point. If the params has no value, then it will proceed with the wrkflow as normal: Link to WF

I've had it a couple times fail to send the response in less than 3 seconds, but I've removed an unnecessary Compare Text and update the time of day so it runs at a time when there isn't large wrkflows running. I'm hoping this will improve the speed of it. It does look like we can send 202 Accepted without the token, but I'm not sure if that's possible with our respond wrk action.

Let me know if you think there's a better way to do this on platform.

Thanks,

Nick

If the client needs immediate action on these emails and polling is not an option, I think you've taken the right approach here.

A suggestion to add a little bit of durability would be: instead of extending the subscription for 1 day every day, which leaves you almost no buffer, you could extend the subscription by 4 days every day. That way if it fails a couple of days in a row, you don't have any issues. You could then update the error messaging to tell you if it failed and when it actual expires.

The outlook max subscription time is 7 days.

Nick

@PatrickIgnoto Another thing that may help speed up your response time is keeping the Wrkflow small. The Launch time of a Wrkflow is dependent to some degree on the number of Wrk Actions in the Wrkflow. If you keep this validation Wrkflow at like 3 Wrk Actions (Retrieve Values From JSON, Respond to API call, and Launch a Wrkflow then you can eliminate the number of Wrk Actions being a variable slowing things down.

I don't know to what degree this will help but it should move the needle in the right direction.