Publish/Subscribe and JSON data in events

Cloud
1

@Dave & @bryce/@bwkahle : you guys are probably already aware of this & are best suited to answer.

A lot of IoT stuff we do passes mostly JSON around but I am having issues getting it to work using the Particle web hooks properly.

Ideally I would like to be able to use {{PARTICLE_EVENT_VALUE}} to grab the data (pre-formatted in escaped JSON by the Electron/Proton etc) and send it to a server by using an integration like:

{
"event": "[[event_name]]",
"url": "[[SERVER]]",
"requestType": "POST",
"mydevices": true,
"body": "{"device": "{{PARTICLE_DEVICE_ID}}", "timestamp": "{{PARTICLE_PUBLISHED_AT}}", "data": {{PARTICLE_EVENT_VALUE}}}"
}

The reason I use "body" is because I have found a number of references around about it, but it does seem undocumented/deprecated. One of my sources of information is this github on particle webhooks

That github also mentions a lot about Mustache substitutions/conditionals and arrays. I could make a really complex object up using that I suppose but it basically ends up being a computational copy from source JSON into target JSON.

There are quite a few topics on this in the discussions board already but none seem to have a definitive answer:
Webhooks with JSON arrays or nested objects escaping quotes
Particle.publish and JSON escaped data
{{SPARK_EVENT_VALUE}} gets HTML encoded

Any update on this? is it possible/too much?

2

Hi @avsdev-cw,

So currently the event value is sent by default in the webhook body as ā€œdataā€. So if youā€™re publishing a JSON string from your device, data will contain a string, and can be parsed at the destination server. It sounds like youā€™d like to instead send a parameter with the ā€˜rawā€™ JSON value, instead of it encapsulated in a string?

We have some tasks in the queue around making it easier to send native values instead of just strings, and I suspect thatā€™ll help solve your use case. Unfortunately I donā€™t have a good idea of when those will be implemented, but Iā€™ll bump that task and that should help it get pushed up the queue.

Iā€™m happy to help answer webhook questions, but just a heads up that my colleague @bryce is no longer at Particle, so he might not respond on the forums.

Thanks!
David

2 Likes
3

I need this featureā€¦