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Web Service Module

Introduction​

The WebService process module enables connecting LoyJoy to external APIs. As soon as the chat flow arrives at a WebService process module, a synchronous HTTP POST request is sent to the configured URL.

Typical Use Cases​

Send variables and parameters from LoyJoy to a REST API in your IT infrastructure, and return new variables back from your REST API to LoyJoy.

How to Use the Module​

HTTP request that will be sent to your REST API​

The request body is structured as follows:

{
  "process_definition_id": ...,
  "process_instance_id": ...,
  "params": {
    "referrer": "http://example.org/referring_page",
    "user-agent": "Mozilla/1.0N (Windows)",
    ...
  },
  "variables": {
    "email": "john.smith@example.org",
    "firstname": "John",
    "gender": "male",
    "lastname": "Smith",
    "nps_score": "10",
    ...
  }
}

The params and variables are examples. The params primarily are generated by the webbrowser. The variables are primarily generated by the process modules you have put into your agent (process-independent variables, process-specific variables).

HTTP response that your REST API can return optionally​

The WebService REST API endpoint has to respond after a few seconds, or a timeout will occur and the process flow will proceed. Optionally, the response can provide variables to be set in the process instance:

{
  "data": {
    "variables": {
      "some_key": "some_value"
    }
  }
}

Integrate the WebService process module with a Serverless Function​

A typical use case would be to call a serverless function such as a Google Cloud Function from the WebService process module. To achieve this, simply enter the URL of your serverless function in the WebService process module.

For the implementation of a serverless function you can use any modern programming language and cloud platform. For Node.js you can find examples here.

Timeouts​

The process module waits for a response from the server for around 20 seconds. If the server does not respond within this time, the process module will classify this as a timeout. There are multiple solutions to this problem.