HTTP requests

Sometimes you need information, data, from an external service on the web. This could be local weather information, currency or stock prices or the status of a server. There are also “webhooks”, small endpoints that can receive requests and trigger an action on a service, for instance, post a message on a Teams or Slack channel, enter data into a database, or even purchase something online. How to do this from within the OOCSI network?

The HTTP Web Request client

The OOCSI server has a client running in the background that carries out web requests. You can send messages to this client “http-web-request”. For instance in Python:

oocsi.send('http-web-request', message)

GET requests

The message is where the magic happens:

# prepare the data
message = {}
message['url'] = 'https://example.org/api/weather/Amsterdam?token=123456789'
message['method'] = 'get'
# send the request
oocsi.send('http-web-request', message)

Above you can see how to send a GET request to a web address (in url). The result of this GET request will be sent back to the client that send the message.

POST requests

Some web services need a POST request to properly work. Not a problem, just change the method field:

# prepare the data
message = {}
message['url'] = 'https://example.org/api/weather/Amsterdam?token=123456789'
# change this field to send a POST request
message['method'] = 'post'
# post JSON data to the web service
message['json'] = '{"data": 1, "transmit": true}'
# send the request
oocsi.send('http-web-request', message)

The request above is sent as a POST request to the URL with the JSON payload {"data": 1, "transmit": true}. You can also send the POST request in the HTML Form URL encoded format:

# prepare the data
message = {}
message['url'] = 'https://example.org/api/weather/Amsterdam?token=123456789'
# change this field to send a POST request
message['method'] = 'post'
# post Form URL Encoded data to the web service
message['body'] = 'data=1&transmit=true'
# send the request
oocsi.send('http-web-request', message)

Again, the response is sent back to the client that sends the request to http-web-request.

Routing responses to a channel

Receiving the response back in the client is not always the best choice. You can add a channel attribute in the message to “route” the response to a channel of your choice:

# prepare the data
message = {}
message['url'] = 'https://example.org/api/weather/Amsterdam?token=123456789'
message['method'] = 'post'
message['body'] = 'data=1&transmit=true'

# route the response to the channel web_response_channel
message['channel'] = 'web_response_channel'

oocsi.send('http-web-request', message)

Obviously, all these requests also work any other client implementation (not just Python).