End-of-life notice: GET callbacks feature (Communication API)

Update:

The GET callbacks feature has been officially discontinued, and is no longer available in the Communication API.

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Original article:

As we may have mentioned a few times, we're making some improvements to our hosting services and we're pretty excited about it. 

Before we officially perform these improvements, we're making sure that none of our existing features get left behind when we switch to new and better technologies. 

Well, none of our existing features that anyone is actually using, that is.

What are we changing?

We're going to officially end support for the xMatters callbacks queue and the associated GET callbacks feature in the Communication API. This REST API call allowed Communication API users to poll an endpoint for delivery status changes and user responses. This helped prevent systems from being bombarded with a lot of calls at once by adding them to a queue and allowing them to be retrieved later. 

Unfortunately, the queue relies on an outdated service that won't be making the trip with us to our new infrastructure-as-a-service platform, and we'll be discontinuing it as of January 22, 2019, when we begin the final production migration for our North American customers.

How will this affect you?

It won't.

No, really. According to our internal reporting, we don't have any customers currently using this feature. No one has submitted a GET callbacks request to the Communication API for at least the last 90 days (as of today, November 1), so we're fairly confident that no one will actually notice that this feature is no longer available.

This update ONLY applies to Communication API customers. xMatters On-Demand users are not affected by this change.

How can you prepare?

If you are a Communication API customer, you should make sure that you don't have any processes in place that rely on the GET callbacks functionality. (But, like we said, you probably don't.)

To determine whether you're using this feature, check your POST trigger request to see if it contains the "callbacks" object:

{
 "properties": {
 "text": "Your pizza is ready for pick up!"
 },
 "language": "en",
 "device": "+11235554567",
 "provider": "My Local SMS",
 "callbacks": [
 {
 "url":"urn:x-xmatters:callback-queue",
 "type":"deliverystatus" 
 }
 ]
}

If you still want the callback information, change the value of the "url" parameter to the URL of a web service that can process the callbacks as they occur. If you don't want to keep the callbacks functionality, you can remove the callbacks object from the request altogether.

Where to get more information?

As always, our Customer Support team is happy to help - just use the Submit a Request link at the top of this page.

Thanks, 
The xMatters Communication API team.