In this article you'll learn how to level up your notification game using ABAP and the Microsoft Teams Incoming Webhook connector.

The steps we're going to go through are:

• Create a Teams webhook in your desired channel
• Implement the webhook in ABAP code

Creating the webhook

Setting up the webhook in your desired channel only takes a minute. It's explained in 5 simple steps in the Microsoft Documentation here.

After you've created the webhook continue below with Implementing the webhook.

Implementing the webhook

Assumption: You have created an external service destination for your Teams host. If you have not, check out this article explaining how to set that up.

Implementing the webhook will be like implementing any other RESTful POST request in ABAP.  You will need to: 

• Create the http_client object. (We are doing this "by destination") 
• Set the URI of the request to the webhook endpoint that you created earlier. (You can exclude the host information as that is located in the "destination").
• Create a rest_client using the http_client object.
• Set the JSON payload of the message
• Perform the POST

"Create http client
cl_http_client=>create_by_destination(
  EXPORTING
    destination              = 'TEAMS_WEBHOOK_DESTINATION' "Change this if yours is named something different
  IMPORTING
    client                   =  DATA(http_client)
).

"Set webhook endpoint - change the string below to your specific endpoint
DATA(lv_uri) = `/9bz904ac-0000-4711-bd91-ce8f3465zzz@1e63z4db-a4b0-454b-a9c3-b39464zzda0/IncomingWebhook/66b00ezz60000c89eb98e233az25c/c7dz82-23ea-0000-bb14-ee9337e48zzf`.

cl_http_utility=>set_request_uri(
  EXPORTING
    request = http_client->request
    uri     = lv_uri
).

"Create rest client
DATA(rest_client) = NEW cl_rest_http_client( http_client ).

"Set JSON payload
DATA(request_entity) = rest_client->if_rest_client~create_request_entity( ).
request_entity->set_string_data( `{"text": "Hello Teams from ABAP"}` ).

"Perform POST
rest_client->if_rest_client~post( request_entity ).

Step it up a notch

Microsoft Teams has this cool thing called Adaptive Cards. You can configure a card using JSON that is sent in the webhook request and the message can be much more powerful than a simple text string.

Check out the Adaptive Card Documentation to learn more. They even have an Adaptive Card Designer where you can build the message using no-code tools to generate the JSON payload that you can insert into your ABAP code.

Check out how Bowdark is improving customer communication using Adaptive Cards.

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