A webhook in web development is a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page, or web application, with custom callbacks. These callbacks may be maintained, modified, and managed by third-party users and developers who may not necessarily be affiliated with the originating website or application. The term "webhook" was coined by Jeff Lindsay in 2007 from the computer programming term hook.[1]
Introduction
Jomres offers Webhooks that can inform remote services that certain actions have been performed on a property in a Jomres installation. A full list of the available actions that trigger webhooks can be found on this page.
This feature should be considered as a companion to the API functionality, which receives messages from remote services. Together the two systems can be used to facillitate communications between systems that don't require direct actions by users.
Who can create webhooks?
Only Property Managers can create webhooks. Super Property Managers cannot. This is because Webhooks are associated with Property Manager accounts, not individual properties.
The reason why it's done this way is because webhook notifications are not necessarily done by any specific user, so setting up a tariff might be done by the property manager, whereas making a booking is done by a, potentially anonymous, user. As a result, typically actions are referenced against the property uid and not a property manager.
Webhooks however are linked to managers and not properties because it is the manager who has the relationship with the remote service. This allows a manager to create one webhook for all of their properties, instead of one for each property.
When an action is performed, the manager for the property is determined and any webhook is triggered. Because super property managers do not have a relationship with any specific property it more difficult to find a manager for that property when triggering the hook. In theory it would be possible to search for all super property manager's webhooks, however that would mean sending one webhook action/event to potentially many super managers and there's no telling what chaos could occur if that happened.
What do Webhooks do?
Webhook methods are already built into Jomres, these are simple objects that are created when certain things are done in Jomres. After Jomres has done everything it needs to do, these objects are then handed to the Webhook Watcher class which decides if and what Webhooks need to be triggered.
A Webhook performs two main actions when it is triggered. It firstly authenticates itself to a remote service, and it sends the result of the action that was performed on the origin server to the remote service.
These remote services can take many forms. They can be your own server where you have created scripts that perform certain activities when they have been informed of something happening on your site, or they can be services like
Zapier, which offer significant integrations to other tools such as Twitter, Slack, Facebook etc. So you could, for example, update a Slack chatroom when a new booking is added.
Different remote services will have different authentication and data requirements, therefore we provide 3 functional Webhook plugins, plus a MailChimp plugin.
- No Authentication
- Basic Authentication
- OAuth Authentication
These plugins will never cover all possible requirements that remote services may demand, however they provide enough functionality to be used as a platform you can build upon in case you need to connect to a service that has it's own set of rules. You could copy or customise one of these existing webhook plugins to suit your own requirements.