Reporting API and Webhooks: Build Reports into Your Product

A reporting API lets your product generate reports for your users without you building charts, analysis and PDF rendering yourself. The usual flow is: upload or reference a dataset, request a report, receive a webhook when it's ready, then fetch or share the result. This guide covers the architecture, security and failure handling to get right, whichever reporting API you use, and how Summarix's API fits.

Build or buy the reporting layer?

If reports are what customers pay you for, building may be right. If they are a valuable extra, such as a monthly summary for each client of your platform, an API usually gets you there sooner.

A typical integration architecture

1. Your backend prepares the data, per tenant or per client, with only the columns the report needs.
2. It sends the dataset to the reporting API, or points it at a data source.
3. It requests a report and stores the returned ID against the tenant in your database.
4. Generation runs asynchronously. Don't hold a user's HTTP request open waiting for it.
5. A webhook tells your backend the report is ready (or failed).
6. Your app shows or sends the result: an embedded HTML view, a PDF download, an emailed file or a share link.

API keys and access control

• Secret keys stay server-side, in a secrets manager or environment variables, never in front-end code or a repository.
• Scope keys narrowly. A job that only creates reports doesn't need permission to delete datasets.
• Use separate keys per environment (development, staging, production) and per service.
• Restrict by IP where your infrastructure has stable outbound addresses.
• Set expiry and rotate on a schedule, and immediately if a key may have leaked.
• Audit usage. You should be able to see which key did what, and when.

Webhooks: verify, acknowledge, process

Webhooks turn a polling loop into an event. Handle them in three steps:

1. Verify the signature using the signing secret, over the raw request body, before trusting anything in it. Reject requests with invalid signatures or stale timestamps.
2. Acknowledge quickly with a 2xx response, then queue the work. Slow handlers cause timeouts and retries.
3. Process idempotently. The same event can arrive more than once; use the event or report ID to ignore duplicates.

Also plan for the webhook that never arrives: a scheduled job that checks reports stuck in a pending state for longer than expected, then fetches their status directly.

Rate limits, retries and multi-tenant fairness

Every API has rate limits. Queue report requests rather than firing them all at once, retry with exponential backoff on rate-limit and server errors, and don't retry validation errors, which will fail again. In a multi-tenant product, stop one large customer from using the whole allowance: a per-tenant queue with a concurrency cap keeps things fair. Say you generate month-end reports for 400 clients on the 1st: spreading them over a few hours is kinder to limits and to your own support inbox than a single burst at midnight.

Numbers you can trust

If a reporting API uses AI, ask how numbers are produced. Your customers will act on these figures. Prefer designs where calculations are done deterministically by code and the language model only writes the narrative, and where personal information is masked before any AI call. See how to stop AI hallucinating numbers for why this matters.

The Summarix API

Summarix offers a REST API at api.summarix.co.za for datasets, reports and calls. It uses secret and public keys with scopes, IP allowlists and expiry; sends signed webhooks; and publishes an OpenAPI 3.1 spec and a Postman collection. Rate limits depend on your plan, and actions and API calls are recorded in the audit log. Every number and chart is computed by Summarix's own code, with the AI writing the narrative, and personal information is masked before any AI call. Reports export as PDF, HTML, CSV and JSON, can be shared via expiring read-only links on your own domain, and are white-label on Professional and Business plans, which suits agencies sending client reports.

Endpoints, payloads and webhook signature details are in the documentation at docs.summarix.co.za. API access is included from the Starter plan; see pricing and security.

Conclusion

Treat report generation as an asynchronous, signed, idempotent workflow with narrowly scoped keys, and most integration problems never appear. The reporting API handles the analysis and rendering; your job is clean data in and reliable handling of results out.