Launched: Trigger automations with webhooks

News from Coda
21

Fantastic news!
Is the webhook instant or is there also that 1-2-5-minute delay?

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22

In my test (triggering a button column with a webhook) it was instant!

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23

Ha ha - yes, the polarity is often a point of confusion. This is why I tend to describe webhooks with an added predicate; inbound and outbound. Coda has enabled inbound webhooks - i.e., a webhook listener. Outbound webhooks are achieved through packs - either custom or pre-made (Like Makeā€™s).

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24

Depending on a few factors (e.g. how many other API requests your doc is processing), there may be a delay from when the endpoint receives the POST request and when the automation is run.

25

Yes, that predicate makes a lot of sense and helps with the confusion. Thank you :slight_smile:

26

This is massive! Very excited to explore the possibilities here. Was hoping for webhook functionality in Packs, but this lets you execute Pack formulas with a hook so should take care of the use cases I was imagining.

3 Likes
27

I have a feature request related to this:

Please allow passing the API token as a query param in the webhook URL
(e.g. https://coda.io/apis/v1/docs/xxxxxxxxxx/hooks/automation/grid-auto-yyyyyyyyyy?key=MY_API_TOKEN)

Reason: many (if not most) 3rd party tools that can trigger webhooks only let you set up the URL but not any custom headers. So thereā€™s currently no way to e.g. integrate a Telegram Bot with Coda because thereā€™s no way I can instruct Telegram to pass an Authentication: Bearer <token> header in its webhook trigger.

I understand this is potentially a security issue (exposing the token through URL) but if the token is generated specifically for a hook and is restricted to it, this shouldnā€™t be much of a problem.

Alternatively allow accepting anonymous triggers with no auth tokens and let us manually filter through requests in the ā€œIFā€ step.

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28

Hi, @Paul_Danyliuk! Thanks for the feature request. Weā€™re aware of the limitations of this current model. We went with this approach because it was the easiest way to leverage our existing API infrastructure to make v1 of this feature work.

In the meantime, if you require unauthenticated webhook endpoints, we recommend using Zapier webhooks as an intermediary between your service and the Coda webhook. I know itā€™s not ideal, so weā€™ll still keep your feature request in mind.

1 Like