WebHooks and You at Fuse 2016

This post is written by Orion’s Senior Software Architect, Ben Bedell.

How do we make integrations tighter, and make it easier for our users to use the best software providers, without losing efficiencies that come with using multiple systems?

Webhooks offer a concept of Events + Actions that the leaders of the financial services industry must push towards to decrease friction in adopting a multi-system environment. The Fuse hackathon seems like the perfect event to engage with our partners on this quest.

What better way to step into the event-driven Web than to start by tapping into existing functionality? Most software systems have some method of notifying the user of events or information that exists within the system. These events are what we want to pipe into the Fuse Notification Platform, a webhook-enabled platform that offers an easy way to share notifications from all our integration partners.

Orion has created the Fuse Notification Platform with these goals:

• Accept notifications/alerts from integration partner systems into Fuse Notifications.

• Allow Integration Partners to pull all notifications. For example, if a user has connected four different integration partners, any of those four partners can pull all the notifications that have been sent to a user.

• Make it extremely simple for users to connect integration partners.

• Make it extremely simple for integration partners to send/receive notifications.

In order to make this possible, we are in need of some development by the integration partners that wish to participate in the Fuse Notification Platform. The end user experience is very important, and the following items will be required from each partner, as well as Orion.

Authentication

Authentication is not required, but it is strongly encouraged for the best user experience. The user that is logged into the Orion system should be able to “connect” to any integration partner. To do this, they will need some method of authenticating into the partner’s application. OAuth is the preferred method, but any method of authentication will be developed by the Orion staff to give the end user a consistent and simple experience to connect with all partners.

Webhook Registration

Allows for the storing of a webhook (API endpoint) for each user that connects to your application. When possible, as part of this process, the Fuse Notification Platform would like to receive the partner’s UserID. This will create a mapping of User ID’s for all integrated partner systems.

Send Notifications

Notifications generated in your system will need to be passed to the registered webhook. We ask that our partners offer some programmable way, such as an API, that will allow Orion to pass the webhook, and register it with the user in the partner system.

Subscribe to Notification Types (Optional)

Some systems allow the user to select what notifications they want to receive. Usually, the user is prompted with a list of notifications the system is capable of generating, and the user selects or subscribes to the items that interest them. Orion would like to create a UI to allow the user to select what items should be sent to the Fuse Notification Platform.

Pull notifications into your system (Optional)

Pulling notifications into your own system is optional, but it’s one of the advantages to the Fuse Notification Platform. You can display notifications from your own system, plus any notifications that have been sent to the user in the Fuse Notification Platform. Phase II of this project calls for the notifications to be pushed to integration partners.

Visit this forum article for the technical details

Here, I want to demonstrate how you can give it a try using our API test page. You will find a new “Fuse” button on the left panel. Clicking that button will bring you to the Fuse Notification Platform test page.

Give it a try here

You will need Orion Credentials to use this page, if you do not have Orion Test Credentials, contact us through your Slack channel.

The tester icon launches the following dialog box:

The next step is to click “Add Webhook.” This step will generate a webhook URL, and exposes the full URL. This is the URL we are requesting our partner to store with the user. It will then be used to both push notifications to the Fuse Notification Platform, and pull notification messages.

By clicking the displayed webhook, you can post notifications manually. As you do, they will be displayed on the notifications tab. This demonstrates:

1. The webhook we need you to store, and

2. Posting the notifications/alerts from your system.

Stay tuned for more updates on Fuse 2016 soon.

Technical article:

0237-OAS-7/8/2016