In addition to receiving webhooks to your HTTP endpoints or connected applications like Slack, you can now also poll an endpoint to get all of the events in real-time and a consistent order.

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Why use polling?

While webhooks are a great way to receive notification of events, there are situations where polling for events is preferred. For example, when testing locally it’s much easier to poll for events than exposing a public HTTP endpoint. Another example is if you don’t care about getting certain events in real-time and prefer getting them in a batch at the end of the day, you can use the polling endpoint to ingest event history when you’re ready.

Both is good

Consider combining webhooks (pushing) and polling (pulling). You can, for example, use a webhook to act as a trigger to fetch from the polling endpoint. Or use the polling endpoint(s) periodically throughout the day to always have your events streamed in a first-in-first-out order (which is difficult to guarantee with webhooks.)

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Create a polling endpoint

Start by creating an endpoint from the Webhooks page in your Straddle dashboard, only this time, select Polling Endpoint as the type.

As with regular webhook endpoints, you can control which event types and channels you want to receive.

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Usage

Once you’ve created a Polling Endpoint, you’ll get a unique URL like https://api.svix.com/api/v1/app/app_2mG6DgUaGlwCNdM5oRCUJec2kQC/poller/poll_59q

You can call this endpoint directly once you have a polling API Key.

-X GET "https://api.us.svix.com/api/v1/app/app_2o7jxcJHDH7Abg52iKsURWPmcEe/poller/poll_o3h" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer sk_poll_*****.eu'

When first calling the endpoint, it will return an empty array and an iterator.

{
  "data": [],
  "iterator": "eyJvZmZzZXQiOi05MjIzMzcyMDM2ODU0Nzc1ODA4LCJhZnRlciI6bnVsbH0",
  "done": false
}

Then, using the iterator in the next call, you can iterate through the events and poll for new ones.

-X GET "https://api.us.svix.com/api/v1/app/app_2o7jxcJHDH7Abg52iKsURWPmcEe/poller/poll_o3h?iterator=eyJv..." \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer sk_poll_*****.eu'

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API Keys

To call the Polling Endpoint, you’ll need to create an endpoint-specific API key. Be sure to store this in a secure environment!

This API Key is only used to authenticate with the specific polling endpoint and is distinct from your Straddle-wide API keys