Step 4: Manage Webhook Operations

There are two aspects of Square webhook events that you need to understand: when events are triggered in a transaction and how to manage event notifications.

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Understand when events are triggered

Events that you can subscribe to using webhooks are generated by the various Square applications and Square APIs. For example, during a sales transaction, several events could be generated including an updated customer record and inventory adjustment along with an invoice creation.

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Manage event notifications

When your notification URL endpoint receives an event notification, you must respond within 10 second to the POST and store the event information securely. Cloud-based serverless applications, microservices, and function as a service (FaaS) applications let you handle event notifications without setting up a server. The Sandbox 101: Implementing Webhooks video shows how to create a serverless application on Amazon Web Services that responds to event notifications and stores the data for later retrieval. It includes sample code on GitHub. For more information about using FaaS applications with Square webhook event notifications, see the blog post Stop Using Servers to Handle Webhooks.

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Webhooks best practices

• Use idempotency. A generated idempotency value is included as the event_id field in the body of each event notification. Design your application to use this value to bypass processing if it is a repeated value.

• Use message versioning. If your application passes Square data to another application, you should add versioning to the data before passing it to avoid duplication and to make auditing of the data transfer easier.

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Related topics

• Step 1: Create a Notification URL

• Step 2: Subscribe to Event Notifications

• Step 3: Verify and Validate an Event Notification

• Video: Webhooks