How do you set the request timeout on a "Send web request" automation element?

Question

I have a Confluence automation which is calling an external service which is doing some time-consuming operations.

If the response from the external service is below 60s, everything is OK, but if the external service takes longer that 60s to response, the confluence automation web request will fail after 1 min with a 408 error.

How can I instruct the confluence "Send web request" to wait more than 1 min for the response?

The Automation and the error message are below.

Thanks

Alin Oana · Answer

@Aron Gombas _Midori_ Thanks! I have added support for an async approach, but looking at confluence automation options, they don't seem to offer a while loop functionality either. They seem to have only linear definitions... Not sure who came up with automations definitions approach, but I personally would have preferred a coding option too. Like some Goovy scripts or something on that line.

Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Answer

@Alin Oana

There is no configurable timeout setting on the "Send web request" action in Confluence automation. The timeout is a fixed platform-level limit.

To work around this:

* Redesign your external service to use an asynchronous pattern. Have it accept the request immediately and return a 202 Accepted response with a task or job ID right away. Then use a separate scheduled automation or a follow-up rule to poll the external service for the result using that job ID.
* Introduce a lightweight intermediary service such as an AWS Lambda, Azure Function, or similar that receives the request from Confluence automation, immediately returns a 200 response, and then calls your time-consuming external service in the background. The external service can then call back into Confluence automation via a web hook trigger.

Mikael Sandberg · Answer

The short answer is that you can't, the only thing you can do is set the component to wait until it gets a 200 response back and continue even if the response is not 200. What you could do is add an if/else component to check the returned status, and then if the API call allow it check the status of the request.