One of the most powerful features of Fulcrum webhooks is the ability to integrate with third party APIs. You can use webhooks to update records in a database, send text messages to field staff, email reports to administration, etc. In our latest guide we’ll show you how to take advantage of webhooks and the Forecast.io API to add spatially relevant weather data to your Fulcrum records.
Knowing the weather conditions present at the time of data collection adds important contextual information, but can lead to slower data collection times. Weather observations can also be subjective. One person’s “partly cloudy” might look like another’s “mostly cloudy”. Using the Forecast.io API can help get more consistent observations and readings.
Our latest guide, Adding Weather Data to Records with Webhooks, walks you through setting up a webhook processing service that will add multiple weather metrics (as few or as many as you’d like) for each new record that is collected in the field.
The general flow for setting something like this up is:
- Create your custom form with some weather fields like temperature, relative humidity, general conditions, etc.
- Sign up for a Forecast.io API key.
- Clone the sample fulcrum-record-weather repo.
- Configure the code in the repo to match your specific form, field names and API keys.
- Deploy your app to Heroku (for free).
- Create a Fulcrum webhook.
Check out the complete guide for a detailed walk-through on how to set something up for your organization. If you’re not quite ready to dive in and take on something like this yourself, contact our integration team.
Update
Since this post was first published we released a new feature, Data Events. For an example of how to add weather data to your records with Data Events, check out this example.