Update on the retirement of Application Webhooks UI and QB Actions

Just FYI no joke.

A client I support just this minute Teams'd me this question below.  I know he is building a pipeline to create a record and he will have like at least 50 or more fields to populate.

[12:01 PM] 

Mark, do Pipeline steps hang for you when you build?

[12:03 PM] 

It takes me 10 seconds per field I want to pair up. I am wondering if this is typical

I just want to applaud Jim's comment (everything is SPOT on) and add one more thing.

One thing he didn't mention with Pipelines is: Once you finally get it built, you refresh the page only to find out, 'Surprise! Half your work did not save.' Alternately, you know the darn thing won't save so you check your work halfway through by pushing 'Refresh' to see if it gives you the 'Are you sure you want to navigate away dialogue box' (indicating it has not been saved). Then you sit there, not knowing what to do because your Pipeline is clearly not saved, but you have no way of forcing the issue. Then, suddenly it tells you 'oops, looks like you are offline!', and you lose your work anyways.

Please listen to Jim, because his experience is all of our experience. And I really want to highlight and reiterate 'New Style Forms aren't working, New Style Reports aren't working'.....'Pipelines is half working'.

The one thing Developers have been shouting over and over is: 'We love the advances you are trying to make. We support and encourage innovation. We love Quickbase. But please, please, please don't remove working and beloved features until you can confidently say the replacement is as good or better.' There may be no more striking example than Pipelines and New Forms to say 'These things have a lot of potential, but are a long ways away from being able to eliminate Webhooks and Legacy Forms' (Thankfully, nothing has been said about eliminating Legacy forms).

I disagree with Jim at "From there forward the process is easy."

When I'm adding a field value in the new pipelines designer it can sit there and take a few seconds (or even longer sometimes) to record the value and then be able move on to the next field. It can be pretty painful.

"Also, Jim you mentioned that the process of setting up a new pipeline feels slow to you. Can you tell me know about what you're seeing? I'm curious whether you have tried out our new pipeline designer. You may also be able to accelerate the setup by importing a pipeline via YAML."

First you have to log on to a service account using incognito mode. When you log in to the service account, you have to wait for the verification code from Quickbase. The verification code may or may not show up in your inbox in the ten minutes you have to enter the verification code.

Once logged in there are about 400 Pipelines and you can only see the top 10 or so. Unless you know the exact name of the pipeline or it is tagged properly, there is no easy way to find the pipelines associated with a table or App. There is no way to organize the Pipelines into folders, which may feel archaic but it is the best way to organize large amounts of files. (at this point you are already testing the Webhook.)

If you are adding a new pipeline, the first step wants you to pick an app. So the step has to query your realm and get a list of apps, this can take about 15 seconds. Then once you have selected the App, you have to select the table. The table load query can also take about 15 seconds.

From there forward the process is easy. 

Now you want to test. How do I test this thing without it changing every record in the table? How do I stop the Pipeline once it is started? I turned the pipeline on and it is slowly changing all the data in my table because I made a mistake and there is no way to stop the pipeline. 

The pipeline environment needs to store all Apps and tables and fields in an organized visual manner. The visibility can be provisioned via User_Token. User_Tokens should also provision Users or Groups. I am a Realm Admin. I create a User_Token and add three builders to it, who can also see all the Pipelines in a folder structure in the Pipeline UI.

This way if I am in the Pipelines environment and someone has added a pipeline with the agreed upon User_Token, I too can see that Pipeline. Maybe that user can set the User_Token to r/w or r only so it is under each builders control to hold or share.

Finally Troubleshooting. The audit log is a bog. Each Pipeline needs its own Audit log container. The UI of the audit log needs to take up less space on the page. Users who are looking at the Audit log need to be able to see as much information in one screen as possible. The way it is currently set up, it looks like a social media page. You have to dig and expand to get to the details of each step. 

In Pipelines, it's been long enough now that I have lost the will to live. My Webhook was done about an hour ago and I have moved on. Hopefully my pipeline doesn't fail because I will have no idea if it did. The email sent only displays a long number without any information. In a Webhook, I get an error. I know the App, the table and the error message. I can't clear the error but at least I know where to look. 

Brian I hope this is enough information to answer your question. If you would like to meet and record my observations for further analysis feel free. I am certain Edi is aware of all these problems and is working his team into the ground to solve them but it's not ready. 

As a reminder the New Style Reports still aren't working. New Style forms aren't working. Taking things that are mostly working away from your customers is questionable. It just seems to me that this decision should be reconsidered until the customers agree it is good enough to replace Webhooks. 

We will have to write Webhooks into code pages so we can trigger Workato.

Also, Jim you mentioned that the process of setting up a new pipeline feels slow to you. Can you tell me know about what you're seeing? I'm curious whether you have tried out our new pipeline designer. You may also be able to accelerate the setup by importing a pipeline via YAML.

Hi everyone, thank you for the great feedback!

I want to reiterate that we are exploring improvements to Pipelines to address sharing, bulk triggering, and trigger speed. From all we've heard from the community, it sounds like these are the primary concerns folks have at this point but we are definitely interested to hear about the experiences you've had with Pipelines so we can help set you up for success.

Hi Everyone, if you are attempting to Add a comment here and unable to, it's likely due to a security setting in how your account was first configured. We'll be addressing this in our site maintenance on April 1st. In the meantime, if you have concerns over the announcement in this blog, you can share them in this discussion: 

https://community.quickbase.com/discussion/bringing-attention-to-the-end-of-life-for-webhooks#bma069ed71-4ccd-4f47-882f-018e5c871027

Ideally it makes sense. In practice pipelines don't have drag & drop. They have click...wait...drag....wait....drop...uh oh, didn't drop correctly....drag again...wait...

There are still so many functional problems with pipelines if anyone over there thinks they are ready to replace webhooks and actions then I'd love to show you how they actually function in a large app.

I'm willing to make a list of issues if it will do any good...

Thanks for all the comments so far, everyone. I want to ensure Qrew members see that we're reading these comments, and there's a plan to address the concerns being raised soon. 

Completely agree with all the comments. Getting rid of Webhooks would set Quickbase back, not move them forward. 

Like Jim said, webhooks are SO much easier to create, especially for quick, simple needs.

As all others mentioned, their 'instantaneous' nature is what sets them apart from Pipelines. Based on the nature of Pipelines, I don't foresee them ever catching up and functioning in the manner of of Webhooks. For my use cases, this is the most striking difference, and most necessary need for webhooks.

Not mentioned yet is simple organization. It is quite often that I need a very very simple automated feature. 'If a new record is created, create a record over here.' Or perhaps 'when a record is saved, copy this formula field to this scalar field.' While Pipelines could obviously handle these, having an extra 100+ Pipelines to accomplish this, is a organizational mess.

I don't use it yet, but for more advanced development, as other mentioned (integrating from Workato etc), this crushes that functionality.

I cannot come up with a single positive to removing Webhooks, so I would be curious to hear from QB Development team, what advantages they see to removing Webhooks as an option? Perhaps if we had more context we would be able to better understand.