Overview

Learn how to use Argyle's webhooks.

Webhooks let you stay up-to-date with any new data added, updated, or deleted in real-time. For example, when the user connects a new payroll account, Argyle will immediately call an HTTP endpoint on your system to let you know about the event.

You can find the full list of webhook events in this Webhooks reference.

Subscribing to webhooks#

Using the API#

The webhook events you subscribe to are delivered for all accounts. Each time a new account is connected or an existing one is updated, a corresponding webhook will notify your system.

• You can subscribe to webhooks by sending a POST request to Argyle's webhooks endpoint with the event name you want to subscribe to. This Webhooks reference contains the list of examples for all webhook subscription calls.
• To subscribe to all webhooks, use an asterisk for events: "events": "*".

Subscribing to the activities.fully_synced webhook:

1curl -X POST https://api-sandbox.argyle.com/v1/webhooks \
2  -u api_key_id:api_key_secret \
3  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
4  -d '{ 
5        "events": ["activities.fully_synced"], \
6        "secret": "<secret for signature verification>", \
7        "name": "name-of-the-webhook", \
8        "url": "https://mybackend.com/callback/argyle"
9      }'

While optional, we suggest choosing a random value for the secret parameter when subscribing to webhooks. You will use this value during signature validation to determine the authenticity of the webhook.

• For example, if you subscribe to the activities.fully_synced webhook, every time all activities have finished syncing during the initial scan, the specified url will be invoked with the JSON payload specific to that event.

Example payload for activities.fully_synced:

1{
2    "event": "activities.fully_synced",
3    "name": "Fully synced",
4    "data": {
5        "account": "12db5af4-fd5f-4d1f-bd98-0360df770aa8",
6        "user": "abdb5af4-fd5f-4d1f-bd10-0360df77012c",
7        "available_from": "2017-07-15T00:00:00",
8        "available_to": "2019-10-01T15:47:00",
9        "available_count": 324
10    }
11}

Using Console#

Visit the Webhooks tab in the Developers section of Console to view and manage your existing webhook subscriptions as well as create new ones.

Signature validation#

When you subscribe to a webhook, you may choose to include a secret to ensure the authenticity of the webhooks you receive. If you do, each webhook you receive will include a signature in the header that you can use to verify that the webhook is genuine.

To verify the authenticity of a webhook, directly encode the received payload body without any added adjustments by using HMAC-SHA512 with the secret that you provided when subscribing to the webhook as the secret key. If the encoded payload matches the signature in the header, you can be confident that the webhook and its payload are genuine.

Signature example#

For example, if your secret was my little secret, you would expect the following signature:

1'X-Argyle-Signature': '13b68c651cdf714d8d00e88d3c9997d2ea2cb6ffcc57ba2d9164af5898169124e75505f354ded4350c96b03b2cddf01cbe71bc26cb2dc656a69ef670bcda0f86'

For the following body:

1{"name": "Account added", "event": "accounts.added"}

Verification example in Node#

1const http = require('http');
2const crypto = require('crypto');
3
4const serverPort = 80
5const requestListener = function (req, res) {
6    // the client secret is being configured when a webhook is created
7    const client_secret = 'my little secret';
8    var requestBody = '';
9    req.on('readable', () => {
10        var read = req.read()
11        if (read != null) {
12            requestBody += read;
13        }
14    });
15    req.on('end', () => {
16        signature = crypto.createHmac('sha512', client_secret).update(requestBody).digest('hex');
17        console.log('Signature:' + signature);
18        res.writeHead(200);
19        res.end(signature);
20    })
21}
22const server = http.createServer(requestListener);
23server.listen(serverPort);

Account connection status#

If an account becomes disconnected, some events will not trigger their associated webhook until the account connection is re-established.

• Check the account object's connection.status attribute to see if an account is connected.
• You can also subscribe to the accounts.updated webhook to be notified when an account becomes disconnected, as the account object's connection.status changing from connected to error triggers the accounts.updated webhook.
  When subscribing to the accounts.updated webhook, setting include_resource to true allows you to view the account object directly in the webhook payload.

Example: Keeping activities synced between your server and Argyle's API#

Webhooks can help you to keep all activity data downloaded on your servers and synced with the Argyle API:

1. Subscribe to activities.fully_synced to get notified when the initial account sync of all historical data is finished. Whenever the webhook is invoked, query the activities from the API with the following query: /activities?from_start_date=available_from&account=account_id&to_start_date=available_to where account is the account ID, and available_from and available_to are timestamps from the webhook payload.

2. Subscribe to activities.added to get notified when new activities are added after the initial sync. Argyle scans all accounts periodically for new activities and other changes in data. Use the same API call, but with added_from and added_to timestamps from the webhook payload.

3. Subscribe to activities.updated to get notified when existing activities change. An example of this would be when additional information about a completed activity is passed along at a later time (e.g. tips for a completed delivery or ride). The webhook payload provides the date range that was updated (updated_from and updated_to) along with an array of activity IDs that were updated (updated_activities) to make syncing of the data more convenient.

4. Subscribe to activities.removed to get notified when activities are removed by a payroll provider. This webhook is an indication to make sure that the activities are removed from your database to avoid duplicate data for a specific account. The webhook payload provides the date range when activities were removed (removed_from and removed_to), the number of activities that were removed (removed_count), along with an array of activity IDs that were removed (removed_activities).