Sending an HTTP Response to a Webhook in Automations

Hmmm, my suggestion was also going to be to add a workspace afterwards.

Could there be a firewall in place that is blocking the outbound connection? The fact that its a time out suggests the call is not reaching the server. If the POST was configured incorrectly, i'd expect to see a response error from the receiving server

I don't believe there would be a firewall preventing the call from reaching the server - I have been able to get the monday.com webhooks working through other integration services like Microsoft Power Automate which have out of the box HTTP response actions.

I'm thinking maybe the issue is due to differences between the monday.com service sending a request and directly getting back a response versus sending a request and then getting a new HTPP request. But am am not sure what the technical difference between the two could be, or if there's a way to work around this either within the FME Flow automation itself, through additional steps in a workspace, or anything else I might be able to do.

This would really just need to be something I run once, a one time verification step, in order to prove that I have ownership/control over the endpoint URL, after which I can start receiving the webhooks as normal and build out my workspace to handle the actual requests.

I have a similar challenge with creating a new subscription for webhooks for Sharepoint lists as indicated in Create a new subscription | Microsoft Learn and importantly Overview of SharePoint webhooks | Microsoft Learn Has any solution been identified from this enquiry?

Hi @ridleyj 

Different platforms hanlde the challenge response in various ways. We have not worked with the SharePoint one before but my colleague was successful with the ArcGIS Online Signature test by authoring a workspace and using a python script. I’ve attached a sample workspace to help you get started. The links here are resources for securing ArcGIS Online webhooks. Python Script: Securing webooksDocumentation: Web Hooks - Security (Feature Service)—ArcGIS REST APIs | ArcGIS Developers

We recommend you try something similar with creating a workspace and using a datastreaming webhook and depending on the payload sent either trigger an automation or send a response.

Hope this helps!

Kezia

Thanks @keziaatsafe for sending those resources. I’ll review and let you know if I make any progress, or have any further questions.

Hello, 

Just wanted to follow up and see if this was resolved?

I’m also attempting to respond to Monday.com.

Regards,

.

I can’t believe it’s not simpler for an automation to pass a response.status_code of 200 or some simple custom json without requiring a workspace. I am running in this same issue when trying to validate a webhook challenge from another service. I thought all of this could be done in the automation UI (running FME Flow 2025.2.3) but it does not seem possible. Currently looking at this article to guide towards a solution: https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/35843596784909-Creating-a-Workspace-Response-for-a-Data-Virtualization-GET-Endpoint

I wanted to add my solution to this post, in case it helps someone.

My use-case required the use of the new FME Data Virtualization functionality, so I quickly got up to speed with it. THANKS Safe Software for all the documentation and examples provided to get going.

The service I wanted to interact with was Smartsheet. Here’s the use-case:

1. An automated process (which we do not control) creates a Smartsheet project using a toolkit, and places that into a central workspace.
2. We needed an automation to respond to the creation event and move the project to a regional workspace, which was not possible with built-in Smartsheet functionality.
3. We used built-in functionality to take a row from an intake sheet and once a checkbox was enabled at the end of project creation, we copied this row to another sheet. This other sheet is where we subscribed to events since we would be guaranteed that the project initiation process would be complete.
4. To achieve this, we wanted to use the webhook API to then handle the project folder move.

Once you create a webhook to react to sheet events, you need to enable it and the endpoint must echo back a challenge as a header or in a response body (I used a header) and return a status code of 200. Thereafter, it can continue to respond and process an automation based on the message data generated by events (if anything other than 200 is returned, it attempts 6 times and stops, then will re-send the messages in addition to any new events when these happen, until it gets a 200 response and purges those out). This system also re-challenges every 100 events, so you have to be prepared to echo back the challenge when this comes across. Here’s an article on the “Webhook Verification Process” and on “Creating an event-handling endpoint”. An API is as good as its documentation, isn’t it?! :) The Smartsheet folks are quite good at this, which is why I enjoy working with their APIs.

Setting Data Virtualization on FME Flow Hosted was quite easy and there are plenty of ways to debug and troubleshoot as you build. This article got me going in the right direction and I was then able to build a workspace that handles both the challenge (necessary for activation and maintaining active status) and the folder move process plus all other exceptions. It does not appear that you can build this same solution using Automations or any other functionality, so thank goodness for Data Virtualization :)