Add sport type to webhook events

[paleloser]

First of all, I want to appreciate you for making the API publicly accessible. But day to day I face issues, or lack of features, that make integrating with Strava harder. I hope this one is not another thread unanswered (or poorly answered) as with most of the threads I opened so far. Otherwise I'm afraid I'll be forced to just stop contributing. I strongly hope that's not the case.

This time is about the webhook events: they do not include the sport type. IMO, this is a key field, mostly for create aspect type.

As ourselves, I'm sure there are a lot of people that will need this because their App is just related to a single (or subset of) sport: cycling, running... Not having this field implies a call to the API per event to check whether if the event should be processed or not. This makes the event almost unusable.

Hoping for an answer,

Thanks.

[paleloser]

Hello.

It has been more than half a year since I opened this, and since then there has been no improvement or change neither in the webhooks or REST API. Do you really plan to do anything about this?

Very hard time trying to get a useful integration with this APIs.

[Elliott]

@paleloser that's super helpful context for our team, and we've made note of this internally. It's definitely a use case that makes sense for why sport type would be very advantageous to have in the payload. Really appreciate you sharing this info and if further details are needed in the future we will be sure to reach out. 

[paleloser]

Thanks for taking the contribution into account.

If you end up modifying the webhooks API, I'd strongly suggest that instead of just including the activity type in the event payload, you send a proper SummaryActivity. IMHO, the current event payload is too poor, and it is very likely that users will end up calling your API to find out additional info. about the activity.

I believe that SummaryActivity is a good balance to send enough data in the event without being too much.

Hope you guys consider this proposal too.

[Elliott]

Hey there @paleloser! Sorry to hear that you haven't had a great experience with the hub so far, really hoping that you stay engaged in the community. 

We appreciate the feedback as we're always looking to improve the developer experience, especially as it pertains to our webhook events. Out of curiosity and for better understanding for what our developer community is after (if you don't mind sharing), what would the use case be for determining whether or not to process an event? Does your app only make the additional call to get detailed activity info for certain activity types? 

We've made note of this in our feature requests and again, really appreciate the feedback. 

[Nick]

This feature was requested many, many times in the previous Google Groups incarnation of this forum. Sadly nobody from Strava ever bothered to contribute to that forum so I guess you're only now learning the ways in which the API has been painful to use for so many years. The reason it was requested so much was because many people were struggling with their limited quota allowance. Knowing the activity type prevents you wasting your precious allowance on activities you know you don't need to process.

[Elliott]

Hey Nick, 

Thanks for the feedback. The Google Group wasn't a Strava owned or maintained message board which is why we're so happy to have the community hub now! We did try to pop in there to gain insights and contribute when we could, but having this space now will provide a great way for the Strava team to connect with our developer community 🙂

[paleloser]

Hi Elliot, thank you for dedicating some time to this thread. I really appreciate it.

In our app, we are only interested on cycling activities. Being subscribed to the webhooks endpoint, for a given user we are getting incoming activities from different sport types: hike, running, swimming, cycling... But as the sport type is not indicated in the event payload, we are forced to make a request for each one to get the full activity details. Then we discard those we are not interested in (because they are another sport type).

Please, let me know if I can provide you more details to better follow up the discussion.