Webhooks are a way to make simple web APIs a two-way street. Whenever you make a simple web API call, you make a request to an API and get a response back—but with webhooks, it works the other way around: The API makes a call to any URL you provide, sending a request when a specific event occurs. Webhooks are used in many innovative ways by API providers, and we recently learned about Smart Hooks from our network partner OneLogin, which is pushing the webhooks conversation forward by triggering them upon one of the most important events out there—when a user logs in to an application.
OneLogin is a cloud-based identity and access management provider that provides a wealth of authentication, authorization, identity, and access management collections in their public workspace. These next-generation collections help developers configure and enable pre-authentication webhooks that execute common events when triggered, and the Smart Hooks – OneLogin API collection particularly caught our eye. These are just a few of the canned pre-authentication Smart Hooks that OneLogin provides in their collection:
Deny Access Based Upon Country Code
Require Multi-Factor Based Upon Country Code
Change User Policy Based Upon Browser Type
Change User Policy for Mobile Devices
Change User Policy by IP Range
Post to Slack on High-Risk Login
Switch to Cisco AnyConnect Policy Based on User Agent
You can program any kind of function you desire using the OneLogin API, injecting hooks into the authentication flow. This opens up a whole new critical layer of our applications to API automation and orchestration, and it helps make the login process more secure. Plus, it reduces friction for end users by automating away extra tasks that should occur each time they log in to an application. Accomplishing common everyday tasks at the login layer becomes so much easier, while our applications become more secure and observable using webhooks.
To learn more about Smart Hooks from OneLogin, you can head over to their public workspace to get hands-on with the Smart Hooks collection. The collection contains everything you need to create and manage Smart Hooks, including the environment variables you can work with to configure each hook. OneLogin provides a suite of ready-made hooks for you to choose from and reverse engineer, but we are counting on Postman users to bring the innovation to the table when it comes to creating your own custom Smart Hooks. Things will get really exciting the more we have developers down in the trenches of the enterprise writing custom hooks to get work done at the authentication layer we all depend on within the desktop, web, mobile, and device applications we are building with APIs.
Postman provides a wide range of functions and features to assist with API development, testing, and collaboration. Here are some commonly used functions in Postman:
Creating and Managing Requests: Postman allows you to create API requests by specifying the request method, URL, headers, parameters, and body. You can manage and organize requests within collections, including creating folders, adding descriptions, and reordering requests.
Request and Response Visualization: Postman provides a user-friendly interface to view and analyze request and response data. It supports syntax highlighting for various data formats such as JSON, XML, and HTML, making it easier to understand and validate the data.
Environment and Variables: Postman allows you to define variables and environments. Variables enable you to store and reuse dynamic values across requests, making them flexible and easy to maintain. Environments provide sets of variables specific to different environments (e.g., development, staging, production).
Tests and Assertions: Postman supports writing test scripts using JavaScript for automated API testing. You can write assertions to validate response status codes, headers, response bodies, and more. Postman's testing framework allows you to assert and validate different aspects of API responses.
Pre-request Scripts: Postman enables you to execute scripts before sending API requests using pre-request scripts. These scripts can be used to dynamically generate values, manipulate data, or set variables based on specific conditions.
Collection Runner: The Collection Runner allows you to execute a series of requests in a collection. It enables you to perform data-driven testing by iterating over multiple sets of data or environments. You can configure iterations, delays, and data sources for more comprehensive testing.
Mock Servers: Postman allows you to create mock servers for simulating API responses without a live backend. Mock servers are useful during development, allowing frontend developers to work independently by providing simulated API responses.
Documentation Generation: Postman can automatically generate documentation for your APIs based on your requests and collections. It provides a simple way to share API specifications and details with stakeholders.
Collaboration and Teamwork: Postman offers collaboration features such as sharing collections, collaborating on requests, and commenting on specific requests or collections. It also supports version control integration to manage changes and updates effectively.
Integration and Automation: Postman integrates with various tools and services, including version control systems (e.g., Git), CI/CD platforms (e.g., Jenkins), and API management solutions. It provides options for integrating with these tools to automate API testing and deployment processes.
