Connecting your own API

Reading your website gets Jabee most of the way. It cannot tell a customer whether their order shipped, because that is in your system and nowhere else.

What you give it

Under Setup → Systems: a name, an address, how to authenticate, and one sentence saying when to call it. Then the parameters, and what each one is.

That sentence is the whole of how Jabee decides. Write it as you would explain the system to somebody on their first day:

Call this when a customer asks where their order is,
or gives an order number and wants to know what is happening with it.

Not "order lookup". Not a list of keywords. The model reads the sentence against what the customer actually wrote, so a sentence that describes the situation beats one that names the function.

What arrives at your end

POST https://yourservice.example/api/orders/status
Authorization: Bearer <your key>
Content-Type: application/json

{ "order_number": "1043" }

Your field names, as you declared them. Answer in a few seconds with whatever JSON you like. Jabee reads it and writes the sentence the customer gets.

{ "status": "shipped", "courier": "Aramex", "tracking": "ARX-99812", "eta": "Tuesday" }

That becomes something like "Your order shipped with Aramex and should arrive Tuesday. The tracking number is ARX-99812."

You send facts, Jabee writes the words

There is no message field, deliberately, and it is worth understanding why before you go looking for one.

A business that connects three systems should still sound like one assistant rather than three. And a connected service writing its own text would be a service putting arbitrary words on somebody else's WhatsApp number, which is a thing you would be trusting every integration with forever.

So send fields. A link you send appears in the sentence exactly as you wrote it.

When your system is down

Anything other than a 2xx, or a timeout, and Jabee tells the customer a person will pick it up and flags the thread in the inbox. It does not guess, and it does not tell them it worked.

If you can return something useful on a partial failure, do. A response you can still answer from beats an error nobody can act on.

If your system takes minutes

Some work does not finish while somebody is holding a phone. A quote gets priced, a van gets scheduled, a page gets built. For those, say so when you add the system and read systems that answer later, which is a different contract: you accept the job in a second, and post the result back when you have it.

What you can and cannot do

As many systems as you like on any paid assistant plan. Jabee calls them while the customer waits, so keep the fast ones fast. Anything that routinely takes more than a few seconds belongs on the later-answer contract rather than this one.

Questions