If you've experienced an error with your API, please review the below API Troubleshooting information.
During your development process, we recommend using https://www.postman.com/ and https://requestcatcher.com/ to experiment making calls to the Drop Cowboy API and receiving a webhook response without needing to write any code.
Drop Cowboy also provides you with a log of your most recent API requests and their results. Viewing your api logs in Drop Cowboy is one of the best ways to debug your integration with us. Within your Drop Cowboy account by clicking "My Account" --> API, and then selecting the "Logs" tab.
I received a "queued" response: Please note that queued is the normal response as the request was received and queued up for asynchronous processing. You will receive a status update on your webhook once your request is processed.
I received a "Unsupported Media Type" response: Our api gateway expects requests in JSON format. You will receive this error if you did not pass JSON data to our api. This error is a bit deceiving - it has nothing to do with your audio file.
I didn't get a webhook response: We see this error frequently due to 404 or 500 status codes being returned from your server. You can check to see if your server is returning an error by reviewing your api request history in the log section of the Drop Cowboy portal. Please make sure you're passing a webhook_url in your api request or alternatively set a webhook url in the Drop Cowboy portal when configuring your api credentials.
I received "Audio file not valid" webhook response: This can occur for several reasons but the most common is because the server hosting your audio file returned an error. Usually a 404 error. Sometimes we see SSL certificate issues. We recommend hosting your audio on a cloud service like AWS S3 to avoid these common issues.
The other reason is that you're using a non-standard MP3 format. MP3 supports many encoding formats, not all of them are compatible with the public phone system. Please note that the MP3 must be standard MPeG-A codec.
What is a foreign ID: We allow you to pass a string identifier through from your api request and back out to the webhook. This string identifier is known as a "foreign ID" and is usually a database record ID to associate a webhook result with a specific contact or api request that you made.
Why should I use the postal code attribute: Supplying a value for postal code is optional, however, this provides more accurate compliance with TCPA calling hours of 8 am to 9 pm contact's local time.
Other common mistakes:
If any issues with the API persist, please ensure that you are sending JSON data. Please also double check our API Documentation and verify that your attributes have been entered correctly. Some common attribute issues are noted below:
Incorrect Phone Number Format: Phone numbers should be entered in E.164 format. (For example, a US number in E.164 format would be entered as follows: +12223334444)
Private Number Pool Errors: If you're using a private number pool, you will need to pass the pool ID to your API. You'll be able to view the pool id for each pool by either querying our pool API or by viewing the pool id in the number pool page within your Drop Cowboy account. To access the pool ID from your Drop Cowboy account, please click 'Number Pools', then click the menu for the pool (the three horizontal dots), and select 'View Pool ID' from the drop down menu.
If after reviewing the above API troubleshooting information the error persists, please recreate your data in Postman and please capture the json body that you passed to our API and the response you received from our API before contacting support so that our team can better assist.