Introduction | Yext Hitchhikers Platform
Overview
Streams is the architecture that handles sending data from the platform to Yext’s consumer-facing systems, like Search, Pages, and Listings. Streams can handle traversing relationships in the platform so that consumer systems can receive data from related records. Streams is also extremely fast and efficient — it handles processing all updates to data and regenerates only the records for which those updates are relevant, so downstream systems can simply consume the records produced by Streams and ensure their data is always up-to-date.
In order to leverage the capabilities of Streams in external applications, a user must define a Content Endpoint. The user can then fetch data from this endpoint via the Content API, or create a Content Webhook for proactive updates based on this endpoint configuration.
Content Endpoints
Content Endpoints are configured via the Content Endpoints UI or Configuration as Code; data is then pre-processed according to the supplied configuration. This architecture provides great flexibility, as the user can define any combination of fields that they want to pull out of the platform, including those on related entities.
Content API
The Content API is Yext’s low-latency, consumer-grade API intended to be used to fetch content from Content Endpoints for publishing in consumer experiences. As mentioned above, the data is pre-processed according to the configuration of the Content Endpoint, ensuring that the query is extremely fast since there is no requirement to traverse the graph in real-time.
Content Webhooks
While Content API is used to pull data from Yext, Content Webhooks allow applications to receive updates in a push data flow. Like the Content API, Content Webhooks are based on Content Endpoints; a user defines a Content Endpoint, then can configure a webhook based on this Endpoint, in order to receive POST messages whenever there is an update to the data included in the selected Content Endpoint.
This guide is going to walk you through the steps to create a Content Endpoint, make a requests to a Content Endpoint via the API, and create a Content Webhook.