Notify URL When Stuff Changes in Xero - Webhooks
I'm requesting "web hooks" for the Xero API.
Here's how they work: Customer provides a URL (http://myserver.com/xero/changed) to Xero, and when something is changed, Xero notifies that URL, perhaps indicating which records have changed.
The Xero API provides methods that you can query and compare with previous results to see what has changed. However, this is not performant for large data sets, and detecting changes involves a lot of code.
The competition has it - web hooks are supported by QuickBooks. Let's get them in Xero - it's a superior product in every other way.
pdelaurentis
shared this idea
I have merged the “callback URL on Invoices” idea with this webhooks idea as we are leaning more towards web hooks, but still very much open to ideas.
We agree it would make working with the API much more efficient.
Please keep sharing your use cases and ideas if you haven’t already: they are a real help.
20 comments
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Charle Demers
commented
Contributing my usecase: I need to keep clients, users and tags (create/update/delete) in sync between multiple applications. More to the point, when I update a client in Xero, Xero warns sync app that take care of propagating the change to the other applications.
In my case it doesn't need to be a rock solid notification system, I could live with a pooling based sync to normalize things a couple of times a day or so. -
Jev Bjorsell
commented
Usecase;
I'm now integrating invoicing between our order management system. When a Payable invoice has been paid, I want a webhook to fire back to my order management system so that systems status is updated.Same/similar use case applies for Sales Invoices.
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Tim Cull
commented
Hey guys,
This thread is 2 years old now but I don't see any webhooks in the documentation yet. Are they already here and I'm just missing them?
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Jev Bjorsell
commented
This feature will have good pay-off for any clients or partners integrating via your APIs. What's the status on this feature? Will we see it in 2012?
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David Vandenberg
commented
Webhooks are the only way to do truly realtime integrations.
Personally, I won't use a cloud solution that doesn't provide webhooks alongside their API these days. Without them, integrations are always poll-based, relying on cron jobs that run even when nothing has changed, which is extremely inefficient. Polling results in either too many API calls (to achieve a somewhat timely update cycle), or a poor integration with only semi-regular syncronisations.This is a must-have feature in my books. And it's so simple to implement that I can't understand why any cloud solution provider would not have this on the top of their priority list.
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Randall Bennett
commented
Usecase: We get notified in chat when invoices are sent out.
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Randall Bennett
commented
Any progress with this? We'd really like it.
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Warren Strong commented
This is a much needed feature for credit control. The side effect is it makes better use of your own server resources; and stops them getting hammered by API polling
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Sam Sehnert
commented
Definitely, an application I've been working on polls >100 invoices every day to see if they've been paid. If Xero sent data to a URL I controlled instead, there wouldn't be nearly as much pressure on BOTH ends, and the systems users would have a much more up to date representation of their invoices in the system.
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Wayne Robinson
commented
Actually, being able to connect to a RabbitMQ (or other AMQ-compatible), ActiveMQ (or other JMS/Stomp-compatible) messaging server for consistent, durable delivery of messages would be my preferred way to receive these notifications.
Even if the notifications were just pushed to an Amazon SQS account (either mine or Xero's, there are features to setup shared or anonymous access now) about changes happening (e.g. Invoice ID=xxx updated) so we could then retrieve the changes using the existing API.
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Wayne Robinson
commented
Actually, being able to connect to a RabbitMQ (or other AMQ-compatible), ActiveMQ (or other JMS/Stomp-compatible) messaging server for consistent, durable delivery of messages would be my preferred way to receive these notifications.
Even if the notifications were just pushed to an Amazon SQS account (either mine or Xero's, there are features to setup shared or anonymous access now) about changes happening (e.g. Invoice ID=xxx updated) so we could then retrieve the changes using the existing API.
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damon commented
These http notification events are becoming known as webhooks. See webhooks.org. Freshbooks already has a great example of this. I need something similar for Xero.
http://developers.freshbooks.com/docs/callbacks/#events -
Adrian Edwards
commented
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Hamish
commented
yeah like Paypal does with its IPN notify. its great!
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Brad McNay
commented
I think this would work for our situation as well. We are a hosting company and would love to be able to have when an invoice is paid, it automatically goes out to the hosting server and creates the account. In this case we would just have a page that Xero would post data to and it would take it from there, but I think this would work in that scenario.
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Duy
commented
it would be nice to have this kind of callback url
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mdonseif
commented
This would also allow to lighten the load on the xero.com servers because currently we do a lot of polling to see invoice status.
See http://www.webhooks.org/ for the general idea.
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pdelaurentis
commented
Here's an idea for how to implement this:
As you make changes to payments, invoices, etc, you can push a note about which object / account changed to a message queue (i.e. RabbitMQ). Then you have 1 or more servers that pull items from this message queue + send them to the URL associated with the customer's account.
This way, there's almost zero speed impact on your core system.
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Dan Rucci
commented
Agree this would be useful so that my ordering system automatically marked orders to 'processing' once the payment came in an was confirmed once reconciled in xero.
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bumperbox
commented
i have run out of votes, but if i did have votes i would vote for this.
