Events Overview

The Cloud Elements Events Framework provides a uniform mechanism for subscribing to events from API providers like Salesforce, HubSpot, QuickBooks, and Dropbox. Our Events Framework gives you the flexibility to receive notifications to your app regarding user activity by having our elements subscribe to API provider events. API providers publish changes to notify the elements that events have occurred. 

For example, a user creates an event (e.g create/update/delete a file) to their Dropbox account using the Dropbox user interface. This event will generate a notification that will be published to your Dropbox element. The notification will include as default some of our Cloud Elements-standardized fields as objectType, objectId, eventType, elementKey, etc while from the vendor, the user could have additional information like name, path, size, etc. An Event Notification can contain up to 10 (for polling) or 20 (for webhook) events objects inside depending on the vendor response. 

While the Event Objects are paginated across multiple Event Notifications, the full raw/vendor body is still included in each notification. For example, if 100 objects are received in a single vendor webhook, then they will be split into five Cloud Elements event notifications, each containing 20 Event Objects. In this example, the full raw payload (100 objects) from the vendor is still included in each of the five event notifications.

In the context of events-triggered formulas, only a single event object can be referenced from the trigger event, even if the event may have been part of a larger event notification. After the notification of the event, the Dropbox element notifies your app that a new file has been uploaded. Your app can then be updated with the most current data making it that much more cooperative and powerful.

Event Configuration Types

Cloud Elements currently supports building integrations with polling or webhooks capability.

With Polling, Cloud Elements executes a configured query every n minutes and captures the changed information.

With Webhooks, the API provider lets Cloud Elements know what information has changed. Some API providers require some additional configuration setup for Event Management. Instructions and screen shots for these configurations can be found in the Element Guides under Events for each API provider.

Receiving Events

Events can be sent to your application by setting the Event Notification Callback URL (event.notification.callback.url) configuration value to your application's URL during provisioning, such as https://mycoolapp.com/callback. You can also return events to the elements with an Event Notification Callback URL like https://api.cloud-elements.com/elements/api-v2/events/<Element-Key>/.

To update an active instance use the PATCH /instances or PATCH /instances/{id}/configuration/{configurationId} endpoints to add an Event Notification Callback URL.