Using HTTP POST with Twilio

[edmm94]

Hello Everyone,

I am hoping to get some assistance on a POST I am trying to make to the Twilio REST Api. My scenario is as follows, we have a customer survey stored in Twilio as a Studio execution. These executions can be triggered by a POST to their rest API. I have tested it in Postman and got it working in Postman. 

My end goal is to use MS flow to handle the POST that way I can feed the execution a phone number based on other parameters from our organization. 

Has anyone worked with this before? Here is a capture of the HTTP data that Postman sends across as a request. 

POST /v1/Flows/FWXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX/Executions HTTP/1.1
Host: studio.twilio.com
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundary7MA4YWxkTrZu0gW
Authorization: Basic AccountSID:Auth Code
User-Agent: PostmanRuntime/7.19.0
Accept: */*
Cache-Control: no-cache
Postman-Token: XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX,XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX
Host: studio.twilio.com
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Length: 284
Connection: keep-alive
cache-control: no-cache


Content-Disposition: form-data; name="To"

+15551112222
------WebKitFormBoundary7MA4YWxkTrZu0gW--,
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="To"

+15551112222
------WebKitFormBoundary7MA4YWxkTrZu0gW--
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="From"

+15552221111
------WebKitFormBoundary7MA4YWxkTrZu0gW--

[AKRogers]

@edmm94,

Sounds like you might need a little more power than the out of the box actions that are available for Twilio in Power Automate (MS Flow).  Have you looked into using HTTP actions to POST to Twilio?  If you have, please screenshot what you're doing and we can talk a bit more about where you might be stuck.  If you haven't started, just know that the HTTP connector is premium.  

Ashley

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[edgonzales]

@edmm94 

Hi there. So, the HTTP action should work for this (it's a Premium connector).  Have you already tried that?  Here's an article covering the action and how I used it to connect to Yelp.

-Ed-

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[edmm94]

Hi Ashley,

Yes! I have been trying to use the HTTP Post connector. 

I have tried a number of things. I just thing I keep tripping myself up on syntax. I even tried posting from Postman to a MS Flow URL in order to see what request came across but that did not work the way I thought it would. 

Here a screenshot of the latest.

Body

{
  "$content-type": "multipart/form-data; boundary=--------------------------329424697522232853751243",
  "$content": "LS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLTMyOTQyNDY5NzUyMjIzMjg1Mzc1MTI0Mw0KQ29udGVudC1EaXNwb3NpdGlvbjogZm9ybS1kYXRhOyBuYW1lPSJUbyINCg0KKzE2MzA2MzI4ODUyDQotLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tMzI5NDI0Njk3NTIyMjMyODUzNzUxMjQzDQpDb250ZW50LURpc3Bvc2l0aW9uOiBmb3JtLWRhdGE7IG5hbWU9IkZyb20iDQoNCisxMjA1NDQyMDUzMg0KLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLTMyOTQyNDY5NzUyMjIzMjg1Mzc1MTI0My0tDQo=",
  "$multipart": [
    {
      "headers": {
        "Content-Disposition": "form-data; name=\"To\""
      },
      "body": {
        "$content-type": "application/octet-stream",
        "$content": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
      }
    },
    {
      "headers": {
        "Content-Disposition": "form-data; name=\"From\""
      },
      "body": {
        "$content-type": "application/octet-stream",
        "$content": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Response from Twilio

 

[edmm94]

Hi @edgonzales thanks! Yes, I have been trying with the HTTP action but this article is really clearing things up. I posted a reply to another comment on here with what I have tried.

[AKRogers]

@edmm94, how's this going for you?  From your error message yesterday it looks like what you're sending to Twilio wasn't recognized, and it may just be a formatting/syntax thing as you mentioned.  I realize you aren't simply trying to send a text, but I set up a trial and tested out the Send a message action so that I could use Peek Code to see what the body of that request to Twilio looked like.  Here's the successful body:

Include your connection information in your headers in the HTTP action, and in the Body portion specify the "From" and "To," which is what appeared to be missing or invalid from your call.

Let us know how it goes!

Ashley

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[edmm94]

Hi Ashley,

Yes I did play around with this originally. It was not successful.

I have however dug to find more educational content to better understand the proper syntax that Twilio’s REST API is expecting.

This helped me a lot to understand what might be required from me in terms of a multipart form data POST. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3508338/what-is-the-boundary-in-multipart-form-data

I’ll have some time tonight to play around with it and hopefully will have an update.

Thanks for your help!

[edmm94 · Accepted solution]

Good news, @AKRogers @edgonzales , I got it working!!!!

The key is to understand how the form data boundaries work, basically the form data needs to include a boundary that is declared by the user in the header. In your body , you use the boundary to delimit all the form data parts. In the body, you'll need to add two extra hyphens as a prefix of the declared boundary, when you are done adding the last type of form data you close the POST with the boundary plus two suffix hyphens. (code snippet below).

The header must be

Content-Type multipart/form-data; boundary=----YOURBOUNDARYHERE

Body 

------YOURBOUNDARYHERE
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="To"

+PHONE NUMBER HERE
------YOURBOUNDARYHERE
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="From"

+PHONE NUMBER HERE
------YOURBOUNDARYHERE--

Once I got the syntax, it was actually super easy. This exponentially expands the capabilities of using Twilio with flow. Thanks for all your advice!

[AKRogers]

My pleasure; great job!!

Ashley

[Anonymous]

I was also having a problem trying to POST to make a phone call, but I found a simpler method. If you use for Headers the key Content-Type and value application/x-www-form-urlencoded , you can the use the following as the Body:

To=%2B15555555555&From=%2B15555555555&Url=HTTPXMLURL

with %2B representing + and HTTPXMLURL in my case I used a link to a GitHub location that I put the TwiXL file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
<Say voice="alice">Assistance at the Employee Entrance. Repeat, assistance at the Employee Entrance.</Say>
</Response>

[edmm94]

Very cool, I will play around with this.

I ended up continuing to play with the Twilio API and began passing across optional parameters in JSON within the post to add context within my Twilio Flow. So I might just stick with how I currently have everything formatted to work.

It is good to know that there is a secondary way to achieving the same result though.

[Maryam-8516]

Hi @edmm94

I am facing the same problem and I can't make it work.

Would it be possible to send a screen shot of the flow/HTTP step.

I would really appreciate this.

TIA 🙂

[edmm94]

@Maryam-8516 Sure thing, it might help if you send me a screenshot of your setup as well.  In my screenshot in authentication, I have it set to Basic with my Account SID and API password

[Anonymous]

How did you end up passing the optional parameters to Twilio through the REST API?

[edmm94]

@Anonymous  the optional parameters are sent as JSON. They would like something like this 

------WebKitFormBoundaryXXXXXXXXXXXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="Parameters"

{
"Department": "Value",
"OnsiteTech": "Value",
"UID": "Value",
"SiteName": "Value",
"ContactName": "Value"
}
------WebKitFormBoundaryXXXXXXXXXXXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="To"

+PHONENUMBER
------WebKitFormBoundaryXXXXXXXXXXXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="From"

+PHONENUMBER
------WebKitFormBoundaryXXXXXXXXXXXX--

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately, when I add in the Parameters bit, I'm back to getting the "Missing required parameter To in the post body" error message. Here is my HTTP POST request. I'm fairly certain I copied your solution correctly.

If I take out the Parameters part, and just have the "To" & "From", the call works perfectly.

[StefanoV12]

Simply brilliant! thanks a lot for sharing this - I applied the same logic in order to get a Salesforce token via Power automate, below the code in case that somebody might need it too:

------salesforceXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="username"

USERNAME
------salesforceXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="password"

PASSWORD+SECURITYTOKEN
------salesforceXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="grant_type"

password
------salesforceXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="client_id"

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
------salesforceXX
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="client_secret"

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
------salesforceXX--

[cleve]

Not sure if things have changed since this thread was last active, but I can fully confirm setting custom boundaries does not work. I reached out to Twilio and they gave me what I needed. Thank you to Alex C on their support team. Their solution matched what @Anonymous posted.

[rpe-peterd]

This worked out for me. I am using a POST request to trigger a flow on Twilio with the original trigger starting from Power Automate.