Over the last couple of weeks, our team has been working hard to help developers build amazing Apps by curiously listening to their feedback and closing on some of the requests which the developers have made. Our goal is to delight our developers by building useful features that increase the developer productivity.
With this blog, we thank our developers for providing great feedback, which helps us make this platform even better and we sincerely want to convey that ‘Your voice is being heard’! Below are some of the new features that we launched. Note: You have to be on OAuth 2.0 to be able to access these features. If you haven’t already, we highly encourage you to check here.
Webhooks improvements
In the Intuit Developer platform, we have the functionality where the developer can listen to the QuickBooks Online events by configuring the required webhooks. It is one of the most important parts of testing and debugging procedure because it lets the developers know and pinpoint to which specific area of the Application is problematic.
However, we were noticing increasing issues with the use of Webhooks. From our initial conversations, it appeared that the webhooks functionality provided is not serving its purpose as it has become unreliable and slow. The following voice of developers shed some light on the issues: “Logging and Debugging on the webhooks side sometimes drives our QA folks nuts”
To resolve the issue, we implemented separate changes for Sandbox and Production companies.
For sandbox specifically, we have made the webhooks firing near real time. This will tremendously help the developers debug productivity to increase and consequently lowering the frustration of the unreliability of testing in Sandboxes.
For production, developers can configure for how long Intuit should aggregate events for their application. With initial release we have limited options like 1 Minute, 3 Minutes, and 5 Minutes. This will be of great help because there could be hundreds of messages and aggregation make sense as we don’t want to overwhelm developer’s webhooks listener.
API Explorer design uplift
We were hearing challenges that the developers were facing while using the API explorer in terms of space allocation for checking various entities vs trying out the APIs for themselves.
We have now provided collapsible panes/sections where developers can decide for themselves which ones they want to focus on. Also, the API requests/responses are now independently scrollable and tightly associated with the entity for easy navigation.
XML support in the picker for code
We also heard that some of the developers were interested in XML format in the API explorer when trying out the APIs.
“Looking for XML request examples for API Explorer”
We have now added XML as an option in addition to JSON to support the request!
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