Troubleshooting REST

Collecting some of the issues we have experienced using REST

Unexpected character encountered

Today suddenly our Zendesk integration stopped working, with an error message sating:

"Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: {. Path 'tickets[0].satisfaction_rating', line 1, position 1673"

First step in our troubleshooting process was to enable logging

Enable logging

And in the logfiles I could find the position of where the error occurred (e.g. pos. 1673). However, the string I found here was nothing directly weird with: ""satisfaction_rating":{"score":"unoffered"}".

But - my REST model in the Flow Connector had satisfaction_rating set as a string, while if I decipher the Json-syntax can see that satisfaction_rating actually is an Object with one Element (score).

Updating my model to this made it work again:

So obviously Zendesk changed something on their end, and this is how we isolated the issue and updated it on our end.

Pro Tip: in this scenario I created a separated Object that I then embedded into my Tickets model. Figuring that I will not use the satisfaction_rating in other places I might decide to convert it to embedded model instead by right-clicking on it (note the warning text that you need to refresh the connector machine steps in Flow to reflect the change):

Convert to embedded model

Note the confirm action