Fun with Business Central & Webhook triggers

Let’s say you want to display a message on your LaMetric clock, every time a sales invoice with an amount over 10.000 is posted in Business Central. Or you want to put on a red light at your desk, when some critical BC job task failed.

That’s where webhook triggers come into play.

Using IFTTT

  1. Create a new applet in https://ifttt.com/create

2. In the “If This” part, add the service Webhooks:

3. Select “Receive a web request” as trigger:

4. Give your webhook a name:

5. In the “Then That” part, you have to select the service that has to execute your task. In this case, I chose the LaMetric integration. You can pick the Philips Hue integration if you want to switch on a light, use Spotify or Sonos to play a song , … .

6. Now you need to find out the complete URL to access this webhook trigger. Using IFTTT, it’s always in this format: 

https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/{event}/json/with/key/{webhooks_key}

with {event} being the name you used in step 4.
The {webhooks_key} can be found on the Webhooks service page by clicking on Documentation.

7. Time to write some AL code to call this URL after a sales invoice is posted in Business Central:

8. Now, every time a sales invoice is posted with an amount over 10.000, the notification is displayed.

Using Home Assistant

When you have HA running, you don’t need the IFTTT service as you can easily create an automation with his own webhook. You need to be able to connect remotely to your Home Assistant instance as this will be probably on a different network than the Business Central server. I have a subscription with Nabu Casa to access my HA installation from remote, but other options (some free) are available (for example the add-on DuckDNS).

The process to create an HA automation with a webhook trigger is clearly described here. It’s important you de-select the option “Only accessible from the local network” when creating the trigger, otherwise the URL is not accessible from outside your network:

The full automation, with the same behaviour as the IFTTT applet:

The code in Business Central is exactly the same, only the URL now points to your HA instance and webhook:

Maybe this post can inspire you to connect Business Central with the outside world.

Ditch ZHA, go for Zigbee2MQTT

If you are using ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) to automate your Zigbee devices, you should remove this and use Zigbee2MQTT instead.

Why? It gives you much more info about your connected devices as you get access to all sensor values.

Some examples:

  • Two years ago I bought this Niko smart plug with the idea to monitor the energy consumption of a washing machine so I could be notified when that thing was finished doing his job. At that time, I only had deCONZ installed with a Conbee II USB stick. The only automation possible was to switch the plug on or off, no sensor values were available. After Zigbee2MQTT was installed, the proper sensor values became available:
  • I bought this presence sensor on AliExpress some weeks ago (had to order it twice, as the first time I ordered the wifi version). With the ZHA implementation (this time using ZHA and the SkyConnect USB dongle), none of the settings could be modified. With Zigbee2MQTT, all are exposed:

Zigbee2MQTT configuration

  • Zigbee2MQTT requires a MQTT broker. In my case, I had the Mosquitto broker already installed, as it was needed for Frigate (an open source NVR built around real-time AI object detection).
  • I couldn’t get it working while the ZMA integration was still active. It probably makes sense but it took a while to find out that I had to remove the existing ZMA service.
  • It was not clear what to fill in in the configuration file in the sections mqtt and serial (the socat section was filled in automatically). In the serial section, you have to fill in your Zigbee gateway. As I have 2 installed, I searched for the SkyConnect port name in HA via Settings ➡ System ➡ Hardware ➡ All hardware.
    In the mqtt section you fill in the details to connect to your MQTT broker. In my case, I used the same user as the Frigate add-on is using.
  • Maybe I was tampering too much with the configuration to get it working, because when looked at the \config\zigbee2mqtt\configuration.yaml file, I noticed some old settings. So I removed the existing yaml file and started over with entering the configuration details via the add-on UI.