Using Send Web Request in an Automation

[Rhys Gottwald]

Hello everyone, 

This is the first time I am using the Send Web Request action in an Automation.  I am struggling to fins decent documentation on using this action, for non developers.  So I am turning to the community.

I want to use the Get all ancestors of page API call to get the ancestors Id s of a page and then use the Get page by id to get the page name of the ancestors which I will then loop through to check the names of all the ancestor pages or folders and check if the Name cincluse specific text and perform an action on based on the result.

My question are, 

1. In the Send Web Request action information what should the keys and values be in the Headers section?  I know I should have the Authorization details, but what else should be there?
2. How do I output the web request response to a Look Up table?
3. Then, how would I read the contents of the table so I can run the Get page by ID information. 

I know I am probably asking a lot, but be assured any assistance I receive will be appreciated.

[Kim Euker]

You have asked a number of questions.  Let me see if I can boil it all down for you.

1.  Parameters to your API Send Web Request
You will notice in the forge example at the right that it has Accept.  That is a required parameter and will tell you what format the webresponse will be in.
'Accept': 'application/json'

In most cases, I usually minimally add the following to my "Send Web Requests"

Authorization is my API key that allows me to make the request.  Content-Type refers to any content I am sending to the request and Accept is the format I am receiving from the request.

On your Send Web Request, you want to make sure that this checkbox is checked:

Otherwise, your subsequent checks will not return anything.

Next, review this expand on your Send Web Request for information on how your data is viewable on return.

Looking at this sample output,

You can loop through {{webResponse,results}} to pull each ID you want to look up

2.  I do not think you want a lookup table in this instance.  You would be better served by an entity property which could parse through your results.

3.  As I mentioned above, I would use an Advanced Branching "For Each" branch to look up and process each item.

This may not answer all your questions, but definitely get you started.  Feel free to ask more questions.

[Darryl Lee]

Great answer @Kim Euker - my only comments:

• There's a good guide to making Web Request calls to Jira (which uses the same tokens as Confluence) here, which explains how to base64 encode your username:token to create the Authorization: Basic header
• The guide does not include Content-Type or Accept headers, which are advisable. (I cannot remember exactly which one is required.)

I agree that @Rhys Gottwald  doesn't a lookup table, but I don't think that entity property is quite right either. Entity properties write data to a page, or space. Maybe you were thinking of Variables?

I could see how defining a variable like ancestors as {{webResponse.body.results}} would then make it clearer when you use the Advanced Branch to do the "For each" loop through {{ancestors.id}}.

[Rhys Gottwald]

Thank you very much @Kim Euker and @Darryl Lee I will give it a try

[Rhys Gottwald]

Thank you so much @Kim Euker and @Darryl Lee I will give it a try