Suggestions to Enhance API Webhooks

While there are obvious limitations to the webhooks in the Box API, they are very powerful, when compared to other vendors your API delivers in most cases all the information you need to update an app, most other APIs you need to make supplementary calls. It would be a shame if the tiny number of changes needed to take it from good/ok with some reservations, to awesome were not given a high development priority.

If you wish to pass on my thoughts to development on the improvements you could make I will give them below.

Webhooks
1. Allow webhooks to be placed on the root folder
2. add rename events in FILE.RENAMED and FOLDER.RENAMED
3. Make FOLDER.TRASHED consistent with FOLDER.RESTORED and throw webhooks for all files in the path below the trashed folder

API
1. Add ability to list all files/folders for a user, using the paged facility

The webhook changes would mean far less use of long running tasks polling the events stream, reducing load on your servers as there would only be communication when there are changes. It would be far more efficient than the current recommended route of using a long running task to call events.

The API change would reduce the number of calls to the API dramatically for accounts with large numbers of sparsely populated folders, the current API is put under pressure for such accounts as you need to call each folder in turn meaning there are a lot of calls to the API, whereas an endpoint that listed assets for a user would only need to be called multiple times if the number of files/folders exceeded the page limit. For the user the performance boost would be dramatic for folder heavy accounts.

Hope these ideas are considered for future versions of the API

Murtza

August 16, 2017 13:29

Thanks for the feedback! I forwarded your feedback on Box webhooks to the team responsible for that feature. For your API feature request, we have a new endpoint on our API roadmap that will provide the ability to list all files and folders for a user using pagination.

DaveCloud

August 21, 2017 03:51

I am pleased that the dev team are developing the new endpoint, the existing folder items endpoint is extremely slow for folder heavy accounts, and must place a significant load on your servers, this will solve both issues.

That is really good news, is there a projected release date for the new endpoint to list all files/folders ?

Cheers

Dave

Dave-M

September 29, 2017 03:00

Any further progress or news on any of the points I raised?

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