# OpenAPI Webhooks

There are cases where you want to tell your API **users** that your app could call *their* app (sending a request) with some data, normally to **notify** of some type of **event**.

This means that instead of the normal process of your users sending requests to your API, it's **your API** (or your app) that could **send requests to their system** (to their API, their app).

This is normally called a **webhook**.

## Webhooks steps

Asynchronous code just means that the language 💬 has a way to tell the computer / program 🤖 that at some point in the code, it 🤖 will have to wait for *something else* to finish somewhere else. Let's say that *something else* is called "slow-file" 📝.

So, during that time, the computer can go and do some other work, while "slow-file" 📝 finishes.

```

### `HTMLResponse`

Takes some text or bytes and returns an HTML response, as you read above.

### `PlainTextResponse`

Takes some text or bytes and returns an plain text response.

```Python hl_lines="2  7  9"
{!../../../docs_src/custom_response/tutorial005.py!}
```

### `JSONResponse`

Takes some data and returns an `application/json` encoded response.

# History, Design and Future

Some time ago, <a href="https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/issues/3#issuecomment-454956920" class="external-link" target="_blank">a **FastAPI** user asked</a>:

> What’s the history of this project? It seems to have come from nowhere to awesome in a few weeks [...]

Here's a little bit of that history.

## Alternatives

* Each application that you have running on your computer has some process behind it, each running program, each window, etc. And there are normally many processes running **at the same time** while a computer is on.
* There can be **multiple processes** of the **same program** running at the same time.

// Package-wide variables from generator "generated".
option go_package = "k8s.io/api/events/v1";

// Event is a report of an event somewhere in the cluster. It generally denotes some state change in the system.
// Events have a limited retention time and triggers and messages may evolve
// with time.  Event consumers should not rely on the timing of an event

main [Tutorial - User Guide: Security](../../tutorial/security/index.md){.internal-link target=_blank}.

They are all based on the same concepts, but allow some extra functionalities....

    * A "token" is just a string with some content that we can use later to verify this user.
    * Normally, a token is set to expire after some time.
        * So, the user will have to log in again at some point later.
        * And if the token is stolen, the risk is less. It is not like a permanent key that will work forever (in most of the cases).

* `str`
* `bool`

But you can also use more complex data types.

And you will still have the same features as seen up to now:

* Great editor support.
* Data conversion from incoming requests.
* Data conversion for response data.
* Data validation.
* Automatic annotation and documentation.

## Other data types

Here are some of the additional data types you can use:

* `UUID`:

        be available. However, if that file:// url references a
        file-share, as in the case of an NFS or SMB mount, that will
        be unavailable.

  So, offline mode has several implications, some of which may not be
  altogether obvious:

  * Localhost may be unavailable. Therefore, even locally installed
    server processes which work by conversing over a port may fail.