APIs Assignment

The idea came to me at emlyon business school in room 367 of building A when I was working on the RECAPSS subject. It is one of the 4 "ADN early makers" courses (as well as Designing With Web by the way).

The RECAPSS project requires teamwork and hours of reading research, articles and theses. With my group we have created a Google Drive file so that we can share our work between us, write the progress of our project, our meetings but the problem is that the documents are multiplying. That famous day in room 367 we realized that copying and pasting articles into our Google Doc was not very relevant and it turned out that nobody clicked on it. So we went around the table to find out the reasons for the non-reading:

• Weak organization
• We're drowning in documents
• At the emlyon we have a lot of group work and a lot of Google Drive and it's hard to find your way around.

But on top of that, at emlyon business school group workis always present and having information from all your peers is not easy to find. So I thought of making a list of the different information:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email

Thus the project below aims to :

1. Transmit information more easily ;
2. Collect information from its peers, all groups combined

To do this we will use IFTTT tools: first via PocketPC and mail, and secondly Webhooks and Google Sheets. For those who want to go further with the IFTTT tools, documentation will be added as well as a video explaining how to send notifications in order to improve communication between workgroups.
That's why we thought it was necessary to facilitate the communication between us but also between our other groups. So I created Improve Your Communication to solve this problem.

But I need to explain how to use IYC to my peers to facilitate group work, save time and develop new skills.

Create an account on IFTTT then you will have to create a new applet :

Then click on "This" , and in the search bar type "Pocket". Click for this one and click on "Connect" :


Choose the trigger you prefer. For the demonstration, I selected "Any New Item" You must then create an account on "Pocket" in order to be able to follow the procedure on IFTTT and thus benefit from my IYC solution :


Now that you registered to your Pocket account and that you selected your trigger, you will have to click on "That" :


After having click on "That" , and in the search bar type "Mail". Select "Office 365 Mail" and click on connect by using your microsoft e-mail (your emlyon e-mail for instance) :


Now that you registered to your e-mail account, you will have to click on "Send an email" :


Complete the action fields by entering the addresses to which you want to send an email for every new item registered in Pocket :


Once the action has been created by putting your e-mail address, the desired people in copies etc., you can create your own action. You can click on "Create Action" and then on "Finish". Don't forget to enable notifications!


You have now finished the installation that will facilitate the work of many students and it is based on IFTTT Webhooks. Now you need to download it as an extension, and you should see this icon appear :

By using this solution, we were able to better organize ourselves with my group and obtained a score of 17/20 on our RECAPSS project. I continue to work like this with my other groups! Now that you have installed the plugin, you can enter your information below on the excel spreasheet so that your peers can have all the information and send you emails with the links very quickly!

Enter your student information for your peers:
First Name
Last Name
Email

Submit See the sheet


I will now explain how to use Webhooks on IFTTT, it's very simple! Thanks to this you will be able to save the information directly on an excel to give your information and contact details to your group!

A webhook in web development is a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page, or web application, with custom callbacks. These callbacks may be maintained, modified, and managed by third-party users and developers who may not necessarily be affiliated with the originating website or application. The term "webhook" was coined by Jeff Lindsay in 2007 from the computer programming term hook. (Wikipedia)

To try to summarize, the Webhook, will allow you to execute a specific action without going through an API. Indeed, the API is more complex, because you will need an account on the application offering the latter. Thanks to Webhook, you don't have to go directly through the application. But you will use requests sent to URLs.

Unlike an API that requires you to query it continuously, Webhooks let you know when information has been received, saving you valuable time. This is a very efficient way to receive notifications without having to continually check for updates: updates are immediate when the event occurs.

Webhooks show real added value when it comes to relieving heavy service update and data entry routines. Many companies are already using them and this trend looks set to grow in the coming months.

We have above used a Google Sheets for your peers to put their personal information, but is it possible to use a Webhooks for this? Of course it is! This is what we will see below.
Now that you are familiar with IFTTT, we will work step by step but without the images so that you can gain more autonomy on the platform!

1. You click on "Create" which is present in your profile bar below your applets as done before;
2. Click on This and in the search bar you type "Webhooks", only one element appears and click on it to open it;
3. Once selected click on "Receive a Web Request";
4. You then choose the "event name" of your choice, for the example I chose to name it "Example1";
5. Once the event is created, click on "That" and type "Google Sheets" in the search bar. You have to associate Webhooks to your Google account. Then select "Add row to spreadsheet";
6. You can customize parameters here, such as the field you want to see or not in your spreadsheet or the order, the Google sheet name & path;
7. Click on "Create Action" and if you have followed all the steps so far you can press "Finish".
8. You need to have a look at the Webhooks documentation to access of your key. Your key is unique. And click on documentation :



9. When you enter this address (https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{your-trigger}/with/key/{your-key}) or if you click on "Test it" after having put {your-trigger}, it will generate elements within your Google Sheets. If you decide to put values within "Value 1", "Value 2" and "Value 3" these elements will appear on your Spreadsheets! In our case we assigned:
• Value 1 : first name of the student
• Value 2 : last name of the student
• Value 3 : mail of the student
10. You will then have to go to your Google Drive IFTTT MakerWebook to see all the folders present. As you can see below :

If you can check my Google Sheets Example 1 Sheet

You've got it! Webhook allows you to create Google Sheets but also Docs and a lot of elements on the drive but not only. The possibility are multiple and you can see either IFTTT Documentation or The Ultimate IFTTT Guide to know more about IFTTT. You can if you want generate a notification to your friends if they have the IFTTT application on their smartphone, as shown in the YouTube video below: