Dropbox webhooks for datastores

// By Joy Zheng • Sep 17, 2014

Joy Zheng was a summer 2014 intern at Dropbox on the Developer Platform team.

Update: The Sync and Datastore SDK has been deprecated. Learn more here.

Once upon a time, server-side applications had to use polling for each of their users to get notifications about file updates. Then, a few months ago, we announced webhooks, which enabled real-time notifications whenever a user's files changed.

Now, we're excited to announce the addition of webhooks for datastores, enabling the same kind of real-time notifications for datastore updates.

How does it work?

For the most part, datastore webhooks behave similarly to file webhooks; you’ll receive a notification at your specified URI every time a user create, updates, or deletes a datastore.

The notification will let you know which datastore(s) to fetch in order to process the update.

The request body will look something like:

{
    "datastore_delta": [
        {
            "handle": "abc123",
            "dsid": "default",
            "change_type": "update",
            "owner": 12345678,
            "updater": 23456789
        },
        {
            "handle": "456xyz",
            ...
        },
        ...
    ]
}

How do I get started?

Any existing webhook URIs that you have registered will soon begin receiving datastore webhook notifications.

To add a webhook URI, go to the App Console and click on your app. As you scroll down the page, you should see a place to register new webhook URIs:

Note that, for security purposes, datastore webhook notifications will only be sent to HTTPS endpoints.

For more information, check out the webhooks documentation and tutorial.


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