Buckle up, folks; it’s time to take your AS2/EDI integrations to the next level, with webhook support on AS2 Gateway!
So far, you had to check (poll) AS2 Gateway to get newly received AS2 messages and attachments. But now, with AS2 Gateway webhooks, you can receive real-time push notifications for incoming messages (and MDN receipts) as soon as they land in your inbox - without having to keep on checking and pulling new data constantly.
A webhook is basically a HTTP/S endpoint (small web server/handler) that you deploy on your own system - or any other system or platform that is under your control. Once you hand over this endpoint URL to AS2 Gateway, the gateway will automatically call it whenever your account receive a new AS2 message (or MDN).
You can write and deploy a webhook very easily - and often at zero extra cost - using a cloud platform.
For example, if you have a Google account, you already have access to
Google App Engine and Google Apps Script -
both can host your webhook free of charge, and offer a generous daily run-time quota.
You can also sign up for Google Cloud Platform using your Google account
and deploy a webhook using HTTP Cloud Functions - completely under the free tier.
There are many other platforms that offer similar services, like
Lambda and API Gateway
on Amazon Web Services, dynos on Heroku, Vercel a.k.a. now.sh, etc.
The webhook can receive the metadata of the AS2 message that just landed in your inbox - the ID, sender, receiver and so forth. You can then use these details to decide what to do next: perhaps kick off a SFTP task to sync the message attachments into your system, invoke the AS2 Gateway REST API to download the attachment over secure HTTP, or simply enqueue or pass along the message data for further action in your B2B pipeline. In short, it gives you a whole lot of flexibility and possibilities to streamline your business workflow, without having to keep a periodic task running.
We are still working on the self-configurable webhook UI for the dashboard (almost there!); but that should not slow you down from enjoying the benefits of AS2 Gateway webhooks right away! Write to us with your webhook URL (or two, if you also want incoming MDN notifications), and we’ll set things up for you right away!
We are always thrilled to hear your thoughts and suggestions; simply drop us a line, and we’ll be in touch!
Stay tuned for more goodies!
